


A Change of Light

by Angelfish (Fish)



Category: The Professionals
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Case Fic, Community: ci5_boxoftricks, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-15
Updated: 2011-10-15
Packaged: 2017-10-24 15:35:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fish/pseuds/Angelfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doyle at last has Bodie in his bed, as well as by his side on the street, but loving Bodie on his own terms is a tough job. Bodie is still holding back, and then on the day of the siege at the Iranian Embassy, Bodie is shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

[ ](http://s635.photobucket.com/albums/uu73/inlovewithboth/Art/?action=view&current=bcddd1f4.jpg)

“Where the hell is…” Bodie tried to turn pages of the telexed report, not assisted by the speed with which Doyle was tearing along the Brompton side streets, nor the warming spring wind blasting through the Capri’s open windows. “..Khuzestan, anyway?”

“Don’t you read the papers?” Doyle grinned. He knew perfectly well that the latest stage of the drama unfolding at the besieged Iranian embassy was too new to have hit the press. But he’d grabbed the report off the telex while Bodie was still finishing his coffee in the rest room, and he thought to make good on the thirty-second advantage. Bodie was getting way too sure of himself these days. “Khuzestan is, of course, a minority Arab state in Southern Iran. Don’t suppose you know why it’s suddenly become our problem, either.”

Bodie thought about giving him the satisfaction. But finding him yawning elaborately behind the wheel in the underground car pool as if he’d been waiting for hours, when in fact Bodie had seen him belting for the staircase less than a minute ago, was too much like provocation. “Well, they’ve held out at Prince’s Gate for six days now, but negotiations are starting to break down. The Met’s been handling it, but now Maggie’s given the order to hand over to the military. The Counter Revolutionary Warfare division of the SAS called Cowley out of a top-brass lunch half an hour ago to ask if they could borrow me and, er, any useful staff I might have… under me.”

Doyle sailed through a red light. “ _Under_ – ?!” he began, then left off in favour of, “Half an _hour_ ago, Bodie?”

Bodie burst out laughing. “Yeah. Old man collared me five minutes later.”

“Why the bloody hell didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, you seemed so happy with your telex!” He paused a beat. “And since the Jordanian ambassador’s promises to negotiate for safe passage have all fallen through, some escalation is inevitable, so step on it, Goldilocks.”

By now Doyle was laughing too. “Bodie, you bastard. Why bother asking me about it?”

“Didn’t know where Khuzestan was, did I?”

 

**

 

They were finding it hard to annoy one another these days. Their last few shared ops had thrown them together in a new and easy intimacy, each of them realising that their partnership had less to do with CI5 than the bond which had grown up between them in the past three years. That, despite early indications to the contrary, they actually liked each other. For Bodie it felt like a kind of growing up, a settling. He would have been disturbed, earlier in his life, to find himself becoming attached to a colleague – to anyone – in this way. But Doyle took it all so calmly, returned the affection with such undemonstrative ease, that Bodie couldn’t panic either, and when in the wake of one tricky shootout they found themselves on Doyle’s sofa, tangled, a bit drunk, pleasantly heated after a casual hug had tipped into something else, neither had moved away.

 

They’d taken it easy, that first time. With so little fuss or surprise that it was evident to both they’d had something like it in mind for a while. Each correctly read in the other the awkward combination of being horny and bone tired and acted accordingly: quick, deft, targeted. Doyle took casual charge, pinning his rapidly-breathing partner down on the sofa, kneeling over him and unfastening his cords to take hold of his throbbing cock. When the straightforward pumping got too much, when Bodie was inarticulate and trying to go over, Doyle slithered off the sofa, knelt between his thighs and brought him to shuddering climax in his mouth. The willingness and expertise with which he did so made Bodie laugh and lift his eyebrows when he’d recovered from the stunning rush of it. “Doyle, you silver-tongued little…  Where’d you learn to do that?”

“Looking it in the mouth, are you?”

“Bloody hell, no. Wound you up, too, didn’t it?  Come here. Let’s have you.”

Bodie couldn’t return the favour – not with that kind of finesse, anyway – but Doyle didn’t much care; he was almost sick with need and would take what he could get. He moaned as Bodie dragged him down beside him on the sofa and fastened a large and competent hand on his groin.

 

After that it had seemed stupid to worry about separate beds, and Bodie crawled gratefully into his partner’s when invited. They slept immediately, and no deeper peace could have prevailed over two living souls than that which hovered in their bedroom that night. It held until eight the next morning, when Doyle looked down at the man asleep in his arms, and realised he had fallen – shockingly, desperately – in love.

He knew better than to open his big mouth.

 

They both continued to see women – Bodie because it would not have occurred to him to do otherwise and Doyle for the sake of a quiet life, an even keel. The sex between them continued, too, and although it was sporadic, sometimes hurried, somehow it was never perfunctory. Never quite casual. In fact Doyle was astonished at the amount Bodie seemed willing to give to it. He would come like fireworks under Doyle’s hands, hang on to him afterwards as if he might never let him go – kiss him uninhibitedly and look straight into his eyes when they hit the peaks together. Except for penetration they did just about everything two men could, and then Ray felt ungrateful that his body burned for more. As a lover, Bodie had turned out to be affectionate and considerate, seeing to Doyle’s satisfaction with a concentrated, good-humoured pride in his work. This went on, placidly, until Doyle almost longed for his partner to revert to type, show him the cavalier dark side his women often encountered. He could have blown up at him then – kicked him out of his bed, ended the sweet deadlock…

Doyle continued to see men, too, as he always had. Firmly in the habit of concealment, he didn’t see the need to bare his soul to his partner on the subject now, and God knew Bodie seemed unquestioningly happy to lie back and enjoy the skills Ray had accumulated over the years. He’d grown adept at hiding the occasional boyfriend and could subtly educate Bodie here too, insisting on locked doors and straight-acting when his more laid-back partner might have liked a quickie on surveillance or to stroll down Oxford Street with a casual hand on his behind. In the bathroom mirror, cleaning up after one round or preparing for another, Doyle often met his own eyes with a glitter of wry irony. The situation hurt – more than he dared examine – but he found it bleakly funny, too. Bodie would pass out if Doyle suggested they do more than suck one another off, stroke each other, grind hip to hip until the lightning struck. If Doyle told him he loved him.

Doyle knew this in the same way he knew that Bodie was allergic to dust and liked sugar in his tea. Bodie’s cheerful acceptance of this pleasant addition to his choice of sexual outlets would burn up in the sun and disappear if Doyle tried to push it to the next level. He wouldn’t understand. Like the fucking and being fucked Doyle craved, like the notion of permanence, it simply would not cross Bodie’s mind, nor fit his broad, contented world view.

And Bodie _was_ contented at the moment, happier than Doyle had ever known him. No longer prey to the dark moods he couldn’t explain or struggle out of until they dissipated of their own accord. Doyle wondered if, having rocked _his_ universe to its foundations, Bodie now felt more stable in his own. A companion for the streets and for his bed, too, when it all just got too complicated or tiresome to explain to a third party. Doyle understood that; benefited from it too. And while he knew he could not continue indefinitely with this constant, low-level heartbreak, for the moment it seemed a small price to pay – for the privilege of touching him at all, for waking up with him, for seeing him lose himself in bliss. For his happiness, which Doyle now found a much more pressing concern than his own.

 

God knew Bodie was happy this early May afternoon, flying into battle. All the elements were there. Lives to be saved, a good straightforward enemy who, political needs and aspirations aside, had misbehaved sufficiently to be smacked down hard. A chance to run with his old wolfpack, free of Cowley’s machinations and pussyfooting. And last night had been different, too. Doyle tensed in the driver’s seat as if the thought had passed between them, and Bodie sent an affirming hand to his thigh in its wake. “Stop that,” Doyle instructed firmly. “I am _not_ tackling a hostage situation with an enormous hard-on.”

“Mm,” Bodie conceded regretfully, taking back the hand. Memories of their evening were giving him problems of his own, and he concentrated grimly on his various unpaid bills until the heat subsided.

 

They’d gone out to Kew, tempted by the first really fine night of the year, and hoping for if not expecting the next day off. Bank holidays seemed to exert a fatal charm for assassins and terrorists, but maybe they could swing a long lie in. Dinner in an untidily fashionable restaurant by the river, and then down to the Gardens for a walk. The place would be open until darkness fell. There was a scatter of other walkers and tourists, but these were dispersing fast as the air cooled and the sun set in coral and gold over Syon Park.

The fading light called shades of blue and grey from among the trees as the two of them followed the riverside track, watching canal boats draw slow lazy Vs on the broad sweep of water. In deference to Ray’s code of conduct – and he could see the sense of it, as well as appreciate the delicious tensions it lent to the period of waiting – Bodie did not so much as touch him until the path was empty before and behind them. But Ray had anticipated him, stride slowing to a sexy amble, deliberately jostling against his side. His profile was calm but Bodie could see the bottled-up merriment. “Hold up a sec,” he said, catching Doyle’s elbow. “Just want to tell you something.” Doyle fell for it, as he always did, frowning in concentration as Bodie glanced around them furtively, leaned in as if to whisper, and planted a noisy kiss on his brow.

“Bloody idiot.” Doyle exploded into laughter. He seized the lapels of Bodie’s elegant dinner jacket and kissed him back, clumsy, up on his toes. They grabbed one another like a pair of randy teenagers and ran for the trees.

 

The grass was damp, the night almost too cool for the adventure but not quite, sweet with the power of oncoming summer. In the branches above them horse-chestnut flowers gleamed whitely in the dusk. And they were serious again, for some reason terribly, not following their anticipated easy routes up through the kisses and caresses into a brief but satisfactory tumble in the dewfall grass. Both were painfully aroused. They knelt facing one another between two great curves of the chestnut’s roots, tense, for the last twenty seconds quite still. Bodie had divested Ray of his cream cotton jacket but let him keep his t-shirt as a concession to dropping temperatures. Ray’s nipples were up hard against the cloth, his breathing shallow and too fast. He sought Bodie’s eyes, his own wide and cautious in the green-shaded dusk. “Mate, what is it?  Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” Bodie reached for his hands. He felt that he’d gone pale, that there was an odd constriction round his heart. He had no idea why. He whispered, “What do you want?  Right now?”

“What do I…” Doyle tailed off. He thought he’d never seen Bodie so handsome as he looked right now, his white shirt unfastened beneath the black jacket, dark head tilted and his eyes filled with a light of their own as he waited for the answer. Helplessly Doyle saw his own impossible wish-list unspool itself in his head. _To fuck you. Not to share you any more, or myself. To live with you, as long as we both stay alive. Feel your big solid cock in my arse._ His cords became unbearably tight across his groin and he remembered with relief that further down the list were desires that might not send his partner running for the first eastbound tube. Oh, yes. He drew one breath and said, on a note of yearning so deep and rough it hurt his throat, “Touch yourself.”

Bodie blinked. He had not known what he was expecting. Not that. What was the sensation now flickering around his heart?  Relief?  Disappointment…?  Then he saw the hunger and fear putting shadows round his friend, and broke the trance. “Oh. You want…?”

God, was he blushing?  Doyle stared in fascination.

“That would turn you on?”

Doyle shrugged. “Not much point in denying it.” A shudder went through him and the constriction of his trousers worsened. “Could come thinking about it.” He smiled, remembering dreams. “Have done.”

“Oh, well,” Bodie managed uncertainly. “In that case…”

 

He leaned his back against the tree and tried to look more comfortable than he felt. Doyle had moved like a lynx to sit and watch him from a few yards away, but the detachment his distance implied had been too hard for both of them and now he was kneeling close enough to touch. Close enough to see every detail. Bodie supposed that if his own reluctance to do this were serious, he would be losing some of his obvious readiness to get on with it…  But a heat that was not arousal swept through him, and he realised that, for the first time in his adult life, he felt shy. “Christ, Ray. Sorry. I can’t.”

Doyle took pity on him instantly. “Oh. It’s all right. C’mere.”

That felt better: Ray’s sinuous frame pressed to his own, deft sure hands in their usual places, unzipping him, taking hold. They would do the usual, see to one another as usual. Like good partners. Like good… friends.

Suddenly Bodie was both angry and disappointed with himself. “Ray,” he said, “hang on.”

Doyle stopped what he was doing and looked up. “You’re making heavy weather of this tonight, old son.”

“Yeah, I know. Don’t mean to get your balls in a tangle. Just… What was it, about watching me?”

“Dunno. Didn’t get to do it, did I?” The jade eyes were full of teasing humour. Forgiving him, letting him off the hook. As usual. Bodie sighed. “I know. I meant – the idea of it, you cretin.”

“Ah, sweet talk, eh?” Doyle kissed him, the shape of his smile a well-known ghost on Bodie’s cheek. Then he sobered a little, sat up to arm’s length. “Watching you?  Oh, God…  Well, to see what you do when you’re on your own. See your lovely hands…” He shivered finely, steeled himself for honesty. “See you bring yourself off.”

Jesus. That hit a target. Bodie was apparently covered with them, inside and out, existence unsuspected until Doyle made yet another bullseye. Through a tightening throat, Bodie told him, “What I do when I’m alone…”

“Yeah?”

Soft, encouraging. He was kneeling very still. Bodie dropped a hand and removed Doyle’s from off the opening to his cords, replaced it with his own. “I think about you.”

“Oh, Bodie.”

“Makes me come so hard. Like… Ah, let me show you.”

Doyle swallowed audibly. “Don’t have to.”

“Want to.”

 

He was lost in it now, so deeply into himself and the act that Doyle could have died from the sweetness of watching him. Propped against the tree, head back, his fist worked his cock in long strokes. The twilight was advanced now and his pale skin gleamed silver in the shine off the river. The blackness of his hair, his suit, his eyes – Doyle swayed where he knelt, almost drowned in the contrasts. “You’re bloody beautiful,” he whispered, and Bodie’s pace increased to an urgent jerking. A cry broke from him. His free hand flailed out and Doyle caught it, let himself be borne forward as Bodie came, pulsing silver over his fist. “God!” Ray moaned, orgasm bursting from him at the first touch of his own hand, collapsing into his embrace. He buried his face in his shoulder. “I love you. God, I love you.” But Bodie heard no more than a muffled exclamation, through the fabric of his clothes and the thunder of his heart, as Doyle had known he would.

 

They took a taxi home, too exhausted to face the walk to the station. The darkness, and jackets strategically carried, covered the worst of their stained clothes. Halfway back – completing Doyle’s astonishment – Bodie slid a hand across the space between them and grasped his fingers tight.

Life was full of surprises. Doyle had begun to let himself forget that, in the dully-aching, comfortable sameness of his routine with Bodie, which he had thought past remedy.

He should have remembered.

 

**

 

Doyle had never quite got the concept of siege as a spectator sport. Given the choice, he would have preferred to be catching up on some reading, or down the pub with Bodie, idling the afternoon away over a pint. Still, it was Bank Holiday, and a bored British public with time on its hands might explain the herds of reporters and outside-broadcast trucks, their supporting cast of vans selling tea, soup and hot dogs. Every emergency vehicle the city could muster in a crisis had turned out, too, and Doyle, still warmed from the night before, fought not to find the sea of blue lights festive.

Waving ID at the soldier who had flagged them down at the perimeter, he manoeuvred the Capri through the chaos. Didn’t much matter where he parked – Princes Gate was sealed off to traffic from the Albert Hall to Knightsbridge – but he didn’t want her to be in the way if the show kicked off. Squinting through his sunglasses, he saw a tall, solidly-built man in camouflage gear turn away from a group of others similarly dressed, frown at the approaching car a hundred yards or so off, then lift a hand in greeting.

Doyle pulled up the handbrake and got out. He assumed that this was Bodie’s SAS liaison, and when the R/T crackled he left his partner to it and leaned back in to pick up the handset. Just Base, wanting confirmation of their arrival. He provided this, then straightened up into the sunlight again, scanning the crowd between him and the troopers for Bodie – who was somehow through it already, and striding up to the SAS man with some ferocity. Doyle frowned: he must have practically sprinted to get there so fast, and he didn’t look happy. _God, not another ghost from the past…_ Waiting to see if his partner required backup for this encounter, Doyle stretched his heat-damped spine and took a moment to survey the landscape: exit routes, cover, lines of fire. But Bodie was only locked in what looked like rather intense conversation, and deciding to let the pair of them get any backlogged testosterone safely discharged before introductions, Doyle headed off for one of the tea vans. He was thirsty, now he thought about it. Bodie had caught him on his way to the squad room for a cuppa, and there had gone their morning break, up against the wall in an empty interrogation cell…

 

Bodie should have known. He’d kept track of most of his army acquaintance, and asked himself fiercely if his ignorance of who was ops leader for the CRW these days had been a deliberate omission, an avoidance of shadows. “You asked for me on purpose,” he said bluntly, squaring up to John Farrell. “Why?”

The SAS commander was leaning over a trestle table behind a barricade of army Land Rovers, building plans spread out beneath his capable, beautiful hands. Bodie never had been able to get within five yards of him without triggering his alarms, his weird ESP, which he explained by informing Bodie that he smelled of fresh come and honey. They had both been very young. Bodie wondered what he smelled of now. Farrell said, plainly amused, “Hello to you, too. Well, I asked because you used to be good, and I heard you still are. And I admit I wanted to see you again, when the chance came along. Come on, Will. It’s all blood under the bridge. I haven’t got a problem with it any more. Have you?”

Thirty seconds ago, Bodie would have sworn he didn’t. He had forgotten Farrell with guilty totality upon his recruitment to Special Air. He said, hoarsely, “No. Neither of us has time for one anyway, do we?” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’d just rather you didn’t open your big trap in front of Doyle.”

“Doyle?  That your partner, the bonny lad fetching you your tea over there?”

“Yes. Farrell - ”

“John, please. Or Johnny, for old times’ sake, if you like.” Farrell let the plans roll up and stood straight, surveying the street and Ray Doyle with cold impartiality. “Doesn’t look like he’s got the weight for it.”

Bodie snorted. “Trust me, he doesn’t need it. He’s lethal, hand-to-hand and with a gun.”

“Oh, I do trust you. You’re still the bastard you were, I can tell that by looking at you. But this is an SAS op, Will. We don’t need a civilian on board.”

“A civilian?  Christ, you mean Ray?  He’s not...”

“He is to me. And to you, if you’re honest, on a job like this. Do you want him caught between the terrorists and the soldiers?”

Bodie looked across the sundrenched street. The tall plane trees that lined Hyde Park were shifting slowly in the breeze. Their leaves cast a dapple on the tarmac, on the crowds and the cars, with a sweetness that denied the world of hurt waiting in the embassy behind him. And there was Doyle, of a piece with it all. Smiling, effortlessly chatting up the girl behind the counter, unable to help himself, charm palpable to Bodie through 20 yards of noisy air. Bodie thought about the possibility of having, for once, an excuse to leave him out of the line of fire. He said, faintly, “He’s a good mate.”

“Then, let’s keep him alive for you.”

“He’ll never go for it.”

“I don’t mean leave him on the pavement. But I can strategise him to the periphery, if he’ll take an order off me.”

“He might, if you don’t make it sound like one.”

“All right. Let’s see what we can do.” Farrell turned back to the plans. “Come and have a look at this lot. I’m glad you’re here, Will; you’re worth ten of these kids they saddle me with these days.”

 

The long afternoon proceeded. A telephone dialogue was set up between the hostage-takers and a government negotiator, much to Bodie’s irritation: demands for everything from safe passage to a picnic lunch were going back and forth along the wire, and hopes of a peaceful resolution were wonderful, of course, but a hell of a lot more time-consuming than a short swift raid. And Bodie had plans for that evening. It was time he did more for Ray than show him the outside edge, time to move things along. The prospect scared him stupid, but he knew it was time. Leaning on the bonnet of an army truck, watching Doyle size up the façade of the embassy building – head tipped back, hands wedged firm into the hollow of his flexible spine – Bodie imagined the luxury of falling, properly and completely and possibly forever. Imagined how Ray would make the catch.

 _Yes, sunbeam. You’re staying out of it this time._

Farrell poked him in the shoulder, making him twitch.

“Fuck. Don’t do that.”

“Never did see me coming, did you?”

“No, more’s the pity. What?”

“They’re talking. We’re on standby. Can’t leave the area, but there’s a decent pub round the corner, if you want to go and catch up.” _Not at all,_ Bodie thought – gave brief and intense thought to the pleasure of being left behind. But Farrell was already walking away. “Bring your mate,” he told Bodie, without inflection, without turning around.

 

It was less of an ordeal than Bodie had feared: half Farrell’s team had turned up, too, and were cheerily stripping the bar of crisps, nuts and cheese-and-pickle sandwiches. No alcohol on standby rules, but they were making the best of the orange juice and pop. And Ray, bless him, was never overawed by the soldiers, was dividing his attention between the barmaid and the lads in his immediate vicinity with a casual ease that made Bodie both proud of him and faintly annoyed with himself: Doyle was plainly giving him room to chat with Farrell, and why not?  Bodie had at no point signalled to him his preference for anything else. Distractedly he listened to Farrell going over personnel and plans, then got interested despite himself and tuned in.

He had forgotten the keen, tight pleasure of military shorthand. It extended beyond language, switched him into a mode of being where individual feeling and thought were no longer an asset; were an encumbrance he did well to leave behind. It was restful. He realised with shame how often he had left Ray to do the emotional work for both of them; how often he had looked to his partner to see how he should respond. Ray understood that, he thought: made it easy for him. Maybe too easy. He’d tried to make it up to him in bed, prove himself adult and functional, give him in privacy what he couldn’t lay down on the streets… But, Christ, it was hard. Nothing in his life had taught it to him. It hurt like pulling scabs off, like tearing open stitches on a wound. All Farrell wanted of him – these days, at any rate – was a plan for getting inside of a building and killing a group of armed men…

 _And one other thing._ Breath leaving his lungs, Bodie looked up. Ray and most of the soldiers had spilled out into the beer garden, where the lowering sun was turning the redbrick a tawny gold, setting shortlived exotic fire to the sooty privet. Farrell had, without obvious manoeuvring, selected a table in the shadows, and his knee was pressing firm to Bodie’s own.

Bodie finished his lemonade in one swallow of sheer nerves and banged the glass down. “Back off, you mad bastard.”

“Okay,” Farrell said mildly, and retracted the knee. He let his companion off the hook of his crystalline gaze and looked out to the terrace, leaving Bodie long enough to realise, with a shudder of nausea, that he looked a bit like George Cowley, plus a few stone and minus two decades. “But do you remember, Will?  You used to love it. I put my fist in your arse to the wrist once, you were so fucking open for it. I used to make you come so hard you cried.”

 _Jesus Christ._ Bodie squared his elbows on the table and pressed white knuckles to his mouth. “Farrell. Shut up.”

“Why?  You had this look, mate. Like a little kid who wants everything on the top shelf. Drugs, porn, money, the biggest bloody gun…  Never for any good reason, either – you just never got given, and it was all just out of reach. You look that way now. How long is it since you last felt alive?”

 _I was coming to life last night in a twilight park – just not in a way you would ever recognise._ Aloud, Bodie managed, “I’m fine. It was a lifetime ago. I’ve changed.”

Farrell shifted slightly. Bodie thought he was getting to his feet, to go to the bar or the bog or straight to hell, for all he cared – but no, it was a brief dip into arm’s reach and over Bodie’s lap, as quickly and subtly reversed. Bodie stared at him in disbelief, the instant’s contact echoing on his flesh. “What the fuck…”

“Changed?  Oh, you’ve bloody transformed, you have. That’ll be why you’ve got a boner like a Pershing missile. Come on, lovely lad. Five minutes – or three, knowing you – and you’ll be right as rain.”

 

**

 

“Hiya, Ray.”

Doyle turned to find Jax at his shoulder, and smiled in relief. He could keep the military banter up as long as necessary, but he’d been getting fairly bored in the process. “Thank God. A human face.”

“As long as you’re not fussed about the colour. Think they’ll let me sit in the back of the truck?”

“Long as you don’t get…  What’s the word?”

Jax grinned. “Uppity. I’ll do me best.”

“Are you part of his lordship’s retinue now, too?”

“What?”

“That’s how they drafted me in – as Bodie’s _staff_.”

Jax choked faintly, carefully swallowed his mouthful of beer. “No. The old man sent me and Mac to give you some backup. The talks have broken down; you’re going to get called out of here any minute now.” He glanced around. “Where is our dashing ex-paratrooper, anyway?”

“Over there, consulting with the real thing…  Or he was, anyway.” Doyle’s R/T beeped at the same time as his colleague’s. “That’s the balloon going up, then. Where’s McCabe?”

“Out in the car where he belongs. Mac and pubs don’t mix, not on a school day. Come with us and you call tell us the grim details.”

“Oh, the paras will give you a briefing – ”

“Yes, but Mac might understand yours. Come on.”

 

**

 

A sordid venue, even by John’s unexalted standards. Indiscreet, too: only a shoulder-height wall and some burgeoning weeds along the top of it, between the deliveries yard and the pub’s rear exit. Too late, Bodie remembered that in the grip of Farrell’s savage advances, he could not bring himself to care. That the thrill of it lay in the danger. There was a derelict Ford Anglia abandoned in the corner: Farrell did not even have to direct him.

Sunwarmed metal under his palms, then against his cheek as Farrell’s weight bore him down. The bonnet was flecked with dirt, faintly sticky with last summer’s honeydew. _Must’ve been left under a lime tree_ , Bodie thought, mind flinching from the reality of having his cords wrenched down. He could smell old petrol and oil, and rust with its blood-metal tang, and his own sweat and arousal. Farrell grunted and shoved against him, the first time through cotton, the next with his thick erect prick, raw and naked between Bodie’s buttocks. Straight on target. No mercy, ever. That had once been fine with Bodie, but now all he could think about, with sick regret, was how Doyle might have gone about the work. He felt the head dryly straining his arsehole and panicked in the teeth of excitement. “Jesus, Farrell, stop.”

“Not a chance.”

“I can’t do it, not like this.”

“You never used to need soft lights and sweet music. Or lube, for that matter.”

“I know, but we were screwing all the time. And – I was 25 years old…”

“Ah, be quiet. You’re still good for it.” A brief respite, then spit-damped fingers working his anus wide. “That’ll do you. Let me in.”

 

Anyone else, Doyle might not have heard. Bodie was keeping it desperately quiet, mouth clamped shut against Farrell’s pounding. But there was no other voice in the world to which Doyle was so attuned: just as he had learned to hear what Bodie left unsaid, he helplessly now picked up unspoken pain, and wheeled to find it. Jax heard nothing, but years of teamwork swung him round in synch with Doyle.

There was only a moment: one flashing instant when the evening wind caught the leaves of spring growth on the wall. Then Doyle understood, and got himself and Jax out onto the pavement so fast they almost fell into the traffic.

 

“Fucking _hell_ , Ray!” Jax’s eyes were open wide, his face an incredulous blank. “What…  What in God’s name was that?”

“Nothing,” Doyle told him, in a voice Jax had not heard before. “I didn’t see anything. And nor did you. _Nor did you_.” Slowly Doyle realised he had slammed his blameless colleague up against a brick wall by the lapels to get this last point across to him, and let go with a shudder. “Sorry. Sorry, Jax.”

“It’s all right. I…  Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” Abruptly Doyle realised that he was, although his heart was pounding with the visceral shock of seeing his partner laid out like that. But it was no worse than if he’d been knocked down in a fight. Why shouldn’t Bodie have – be spectacularly had by – another man?  Doyle had done the same, five times at least since their relationship began, which didn’t leave much room for moral outrage. And if he was now kicking himself for his own stupidity, for his lack of nerve, for his assumption that Bodie couldn’t cope with the prospect of fucking or getting fucked – that was hardly Bodie’s fault, was it?  Hardly Bodie’s fault if Doyle now wanted to throw up or cry… Jax was looking at him with a kindness Doyle knew he normally reserved for his kids, despite the rough treatment. “Sorry,” he said again, turning away.

 

Farrell’s three minutes had been on the generous side. Through a blur of tears Bodie saw the second hand of his own watch – just about all he could see, jammed flat down over the bonnet now – sweep past the two’s halfway point, and felt his trapped cock, getting crushed against the car by Farrell’s thrusting, rise and fill and try to burst. That was the problem, he reflected, from increasing distance. A rough fuck in the arse would do it for him every time. There was no special magic about John Farrell – he was just one of the few souls brave enough to tackle the job. Bodie groaned, silencing it in the crook of his elbow, stretched out across the car bonnet and came, sharp and violent, a brief muscle-tearing wrench. The movement in his backside – Farrell was in him with customary depth and thoroughness – became anguish the second his excitement had ebbed. Bodie, who had forgotten that particular human misery, rode it out, eyes squeezed shut, flashbacks playing in his head’s redblack darkness of Ray on his knees in morning sunlight, sucking him off with tender concentration, as if that was the one thing worth doing in the world.

Farrell didn’t keep him waiting long. His rhythm broke down and he sank a bruising grip into the flesh of Bodie’s shoulders  “Oh, you bastard,” he rasped, mouth wet and hot against Bodie’s nape, big tongue pressing. A pulse-beat later Bodie felt the corresponding change inside – a warmth, and a slackening. He whispered, “Christ almighty,” and clenched his fists tight to get through the withdrawal in silence.

Farrell buttoned up, watching him with amused detachment. “Not so much fun these days, then?”

Bodie sought for an answer. It felt important to him that he hold Farrell’s gaze while sorting out his clothes, his harness, checking the clip of his gun. Then he surprised himself by turning aside and vomiting onto the cobbles. His companion observed this stonily. “Well,” he commented, as Bodie straightened up, shivering and wiping his mouth, “maybe you grew up after all.”

 

**

 

Bodie was faintly puzzled by Doyle’s acquiescence to John Farrell’s battle plan, but his relief was too intense for him to question it. Doyle, who was experiencing a loss of interest he prayed was temporary – because it felt total – found himself waiting amongst the paratroopers in hot and uncomfortable body armour, exchanging small talk and vaguely hoping for a kick-off. The afternoon wore on, growing warmer and noisier. Bodie stopped by to inform him that Heathrow was bringing its planes in on lower flight paths, and that the gas-board men working in the adjoining street had been instructed to get busy drilling. “Cover noise for when we go in. You all right, mate?  Don’t mind bringing up the rear?”

Doyle gave it thought. He should mind, and he was aware that in normal circumstances Commander John Farrell would by now be very tired of him. His place was at Bodie’s side. His indifference at present felt alien, like the onset of a flu virus, something he could shake off with an effort of will. But the street felt airless and dead around him, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he simply couldn’t be bothered. “No, I’m fine.” He gave Bodie the subtle onceover he would expect, handsome as he was in borrowed camo gear and bulletproofs. “Bring up your rear any time.” That was expected, too, though perhaps not so loudly – Bodie, happily indiscreet for the general public, was not so keen on a suggestive comment here. Momentarily Doyle wanted to kill him. Then he took pity: now wasn’t the time or the place. And Bodie didn’t look great, either, grey around the eyes. Battle nerves?  He’d confided once that he did get scared. “I’m fine,” Doyle repeated, managing a halfway-genuine smile. “You go and play with your soldiers.”

 

“Got something going with him, then?  Your Ray?  Is that the problem?”

Bodie turned and gave Farrell a look that should have dropped him dead in his boots. He and the commander were poised either side of a stairwell at the rear of the embassy building, Doyle and the others biding their time in an alley a few yards away. Twenty minutes earlier they had all stood and watched a news feed of the embassy’s press attaché – or rather what was left of him – getting slung lifeless out onto the street, and the Met had handed over to the MoD. So now they were in front of camera – the SAS, for the first time in its shadowy history, about to conduct business under the gaze of the world. And there was going to be hell to pay. Bodie glanced up to the roof, where the abseil team was waiting. “You pick your times for a chat, don’t you?”

“Well, if you think about it, this might be our last chance. Come on. I’ve seen how you look at him. Serious, is it?”

 _You’d be the last one I’d tell._ “No.”

“That’s good, because I think he saw us.”

Bodie’s throat went dry and a kind of dead sickness went through him, a desiccating misery like winter in fresh leaves. A child’s desire swept through him, to wipe out the last few hours of his existence. Rip it out from the book of his life.

He wouldn’t stop there, either – he’d tear out every sheet that bore John Farrell’s name. The fact that none of it had been Farrell’s fault just made it worse. Bodie supposed, on reflection – he hadn’t even the energy to be embarrassed about it any more – that it had been a kind of love. He hadn’t recognised it because men were what you shagged when the supply of girls dried up, not sodding love objects. All right, he and Farrell had loved one another, for five insane months on a Belfast tour of duty. Fucked one another stupid, too, God knew, in an access of sexual obsession neither had known they had in them. But there was more to it than that. They’d walked through the nail bombs and car bombs and culvert bombs, the riots and the scalding tides of religious hate and vengeance, and they’d watched one another’s backs with more than camaraderie. With a kind of rough, unspoken love.

Nevertheless, when Special Air had called Bodie up, and Farrell had asked him – begged him – not to go, in the name of love, making the fatal mistake of daring to speak its name  – Bodie had laughed in his face, in terror and shame and disgust. Informed him they were soldiers, not a pair of queers. Farrell’s suicide attempt shortly thereafter had been adroitly covered up by his COs, turned into a drinking binge gone horribly awry.

 _Farrell deserved better than what I was. Ray deserves better than what I’ve become._ “Doesn’t matter,” he said dryly. “Ray’s worth a million of me, John, to be honest. If I could love anyone, it’d be him. But as far as sex goes – it’s nothing. Nice off-duty fuck if I can’t be arsed to chase after a girl, that’s all.”

 

It just wasn’t Doyle’s day. Ordered to file in silence with the others into the stairwell’s shadows, one bulletproofed soldier anonymous behind a visor, he heard only the last part.

He absorbed it in silence: his dignity was dear to him. Then John Farrell grinned directly at him, and chucked a charge onto the landing above them – signal for the abseil team and the ground assault – and the end began.

 

**

 

Bodie’s dive across the open space would look like a kamikaze run, a suicide dash, to the uninitiated. But he knew he had cover. There was one spot in the big square office from which cover could be provided, and there would be a man in place. Bodie had become so utterly used to Doyle’s perfect understanding of such matters that he did not even glance to check.

And Ray saw it, from the safe distance to which Farrell had ordered him – saw the space between a stately marble pillar and a desk. He saw that; saw Bodie fail to confirm. Bodie’s total conviction met Doyle’s need to be there so hard that for an instant he was – in his head the kill-shot was home, his system alight with the primal elation of saving his partner, better than sex, better than breathing, better than saving himself. Farrell dropped into the cover spot – too late, Doyle thought, but it would be all right, because Bodie had bored him to catatonia with tales of how good they were, how fast, these men, this elite…

But John Farrell’s reflexes were not tied to the blood-hot mystery that connected Ray with his other half in a shootout. Farrell was competent, not inspired.

It wasn’t enough.

 

Doyle knelt in the middle of a raging gun battle. With the luck of the damned, he knew no bullet would touch him now. The roaring of Kalashnikovs, and the unexpected M60 that had torn Bodie open from ribs to thigh, faded off to a seashore whisper. His own heart was louder in his ears.

“Fuck,” Bodie said, lifting a crimson hand from the hole in his side. Doyle’s promptly slammed down in its place, but he was bleeding so hard from elsewhere that it made little difference. “Armour-piercing bullets.”

“Looks like,” Doyle agreed, distractedly, lifting him into his lap, out of the drowning pool of his own lungs. “Now just shut up and breathe. Breathe.”

“Always better… equipped than we are. Always… You want to tell Cowley.”

“ _You_ tell him.” Doyle cradled him, willing warmth and life into the failing body. He would pour out all he had and not stop when he was empty. He would go where Bodie was going. “Jesus!” He grabbed the bone-white face, leaving a bloody print. Terror and desolation whelmed in him, bigger than the ocean, a loneliness he hadn’t felt since childhood. “Don’t go!” Fiercely he silenced himself: he would not communicate his fear into the dying man. “It doesn’t end here, love, you know it doesn’t!  Hang on!”

Bodie smiled at him. His eyes were blank and depthless with shock. “Sorry, Ray,” he managed. His grip on Doyle’s arm went slack. “I can’t.”

 

A commando was marching the M60’s owner down the stairs from the upper floor where he’d taken refuge: Doyle gathered that it was over. The boy – and it _was_ a boy, Doyle noted without a flicker, a kid in his late teens – had been stripped of his weaponry. Doyle said to the SAS man, “Let him go. You step aside.”

“What?  It’s all right, I’ve got him – ”

The boy was crying with fright.

 _“Let him go!  Get out of the way!”_

The commando had never heard such a voice before; hadn’t thought human throat capable. It hit walls and glass almost like music, cracked down into a vulpine snarl. He obeyed it, and watched the fine-boned man, who had seemed so out of place among the troops, step up and shoot his captive through the heart.

 

John Farrell had gone to kneel beside Bodie, on the priceless Persian carpet now transforming to the colours of spilled-out human life. In the dead silence following the shot, Doyle noted – short, red thoughts – that the commander was very busy, very active and urgent, about his ministrations to a corpse…

Farrell looked up dryly. “If you’re quite finished there, Doyle, I could use some help with wound pressure.”


	2. Chapter 2

Bodie’s first thought, on his return from the brink of limitless dark, was that his partner needed a good long rest. The view was blurred but Ray was plainly knackered, almost cadaverous…

“Doyle, when did you last sleep?  You look fucking horrible.”

“It’s Murph,” said Murphy, dryly, and watched while Bodie, who allegedly was half a breath from dying, broke into helpless chuckles. Then he reached sharpish for the oxygen mask and pressed it over Bodie’s blue-tinged mouth. “You’re only laughing,” he informed him, “because they’ve given you enough morphine to stop a charging bull. You’ve got a hole in your leg I could put my fist into, and the only reason you’re still here is that you’re too bloody thick to die. All right?”

Bodie took this in, as well as he was able with his lungs folding up. “All right,” he consented at length. Then the wrongness of Murph in Doyle’s place at this time struck him hard. They each tried, he and Doyle, not to let the other wake in hospitals alone. “Murphy, where’s Ray?”

“He’s all right,” Murphy said at once, answering the unspoken. “But he’s… got himself into some trouble, your mate has. I’ll tell you, if you keep your hair on.”

Bodie needed to be told. Emerging from the shadows, his mind grabbed one piece of its memory’s puzzle after another and jammed them together, and it was only when the pattern was almost complete that he realised the gap. “Christ. The embassy. I remember driving there with Doyle, and… meeting the SAS guy. Nothing after that. What the bloody hell happened?”

Inexcusably, Bodie’s first response to Murphy’s tale was a surge of warmth. It went through him like arousal, that same sense of shocked pleasure – that Ray would come for him. That Ray would kill for him. Then reality asserted itself through the chemical veils and he jolted and tried to sit up. “Christ. Where is he?”

“Lie still or I’ll get that nurse in – the one that looks like Giant Haystacks, not the pretty one. I mean it. He’s in custody. The old man’s tried to spring him on bail, but he’s what they call a flight risk and the judge said no.”

“In custody…  Murph, it was an op. A gun-battle. He shot a terrorist.”

“He shot Prince Karim of Talashad, only son of the shah. He shot a surrendered teenager. I don’t give a crap about the boy, Bodie, but he did it in front of an SAS unit, and their commander cleaned his doorstep very, very publicly.”

Bodie drew a ragged breath. “Farrell.”

“Yeah. Wasn’t about to have one of his own lads thrown overboard. Every news agency between here and the Middle East knew about it by midnight, and the Talashad regime was screaming for retribution by daybreak. Cowley reckons Doyle might be safer where he is at the moment.”

 _“Farrell._ Murph, get him in here. I’ll make the bastard tell the truth - ”

Murphy snatched up the oxygen mask again. “Ssh. Shut up and breathe. Bodie, he did tell the truth. It was a textbook op otherwise, just two hostage casualties. Doyle thought you were dead, and he… snapped. The old man can’t defend the indefensible.” He waited until he thought Bodie could hear him. “Doyle isn’t trying to defend himself. He’s pleaded guilty.”

 

**

 

Doyle had two visitors during his first week in Fleetgate. The first he dealt with through glass and a phone link, the same as did everyone else. He was not sure what John Farrell had come here to accomplish, and much less did he care. Slowly his senses were adjusting to the sights and sounds of the inside of a jail, and he attended to these – clanging doors, the monosyllabic shouts in which men deprived of their rights and freedom were habitually addressed – more keenly than he did to the filtered voice in the plastic handset.

After a while he realised that Farrell was explaining to him why he’d made sure half the planet knew the circumstances of Prince Karim’s death. There was no apology in it: rather, the commander seemed to be enjoying pointing out to him the necessities of battleground accountability. _In these days of delicate entente. Damage control._ Doyle, who had heard it all before from the politicians who tried to rein in Cowley’s maverick department, listened without interest. It wasn’t why _he_ cared that the boy was dead. Then Farrell said, “It’s not that I don’t understand. I’ve known Bodie a long time. I could’ve shot someone myself, seeing him in the hospital the other day, full of drips and – ”

Doyle animated. The wardens noticed his sudden jerk upright, and he aborted the slam of one palm to the glass. “You’ve seen him?”

“Briefly. He wasn’t conscious. Perforated lung, and a chunk taken out of his thigh. Hit his femoral, which is why he nearly bled out. Doctors say he’ll live.” Farrell paused, assessingly, like a cat with a worn-out mouse. “Probably.”

He pushed his chair back to rest on two legs, and Doyle suddenly knew he was waiting for the flash of his reaction. That this was what he wanted. Very well; he could have it. “You bastard, Farrell!” he snarled. “If you were gonna suck him back into your military machine, you could’ve at least looked after him. Bodie thinks the sun shines out of your lot’s collective arse!  He trusted you for covering fire. Where were you?”

“Seeing to my men’s collective arse, as you put it. The collective good. Survival of the maximum number. Individual lives come second to that. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Fucking right, I don’t. God spare me from soldiers…  Bodie never got out from under your brothers-in-arms crap. He mistook it for family. He still does. One look from you and he’s a drone in your fucking anthill. I should’ve shot you, not poor Karim.”

Farrell did not seem to mind this tirade: raised an eyebrow in cool interest. “Is what you’ve made him any better, Doyle?  So dependent on one man that he can’t survive on his own?  He’d never have made that dive, if you and your mob hadn’t taught him to forget everything he once knew about discipline.”

Doyle, who had thought he felt only cold fire, realised with horror that his cheeks were wet. He whispered hoarsely, “What are you doing here?  What do you want?”

“I think I wanted another look at you. To see what brought a good man down.”

 

The next visitor was gentler; had privileges and could command privacy. He would have been harder to deal with, but Doyle had gone numb.

“I killed a man – a boy – in cold blood.”

Cowley turned away. He paced as far as the cell’s confines would let him, fastening his hands behind his back. Then he turned to face Doyle again, almost smiling. “Cold blood?  You thought you’d just lost him, didn’t you?  Lost Bodie.” He shook his head. “Laddie, did your blood ever run hotter in your veins?”

Doyle just stared at him. Cowley was aware that at no point of his questioning had Doyle attempted to use his partner’s death – his brief but total belief in it – as an excuse for his actions. It was typical of Doyle generally not to try and excuse himself; he tended to do what he thought was right then shouldered the responsibility with grim thoroughness afterward. Then, he’d always had Bodie to stand up for him, hotly deny the blame he often seemed incapable of avoiding for himself… With a surge of amusement and grief, the old man saw the pair of them on the far side of his desk once more, Doyle’s head down, Bodie outraged, eyes flashing: _it wasn’t Doyle’s fault, sir!  They started firing on us out of nowhere…_

Cowley said quietly, as if to himself, “ _Crime passionnel._ A… compassionate, civilised consideration, in murder cases.” He straightened his shoulders and went on more firmly, “I know you feel dreadful, Doyle, but you must let me help you. I believe that I can.”

“I don’t feel dreadful, sir. Don’t feel anything.”

 

**

 

It had been three weeks, and Doyle was almost used to the smell of the cheap disinfectant. He’d also smacked enough heads against enough walls to instill, even into the wing’s hardest cases, the advisability of leaving him alone while he had a shower.

Not everyone had the same deterrents at their command. Doyle continued to get dressed, while the muffled cries from down the corridor intensified. The bleak concrete shower room provided a perfect sounding chamber, although the excellence of the acoustics seemed lost upon the warden posted by the door. Doyle knew all his local voices by now, and this one was recognisable even with – presumably – a big fat hand clamped across its owner’s mouth. David Wilkes, getting comprehensively buggered in one of the stalls.

Not for the first time. Sinking down onto a bench to lace up his boots, Doyle asked himself why he didn’t have it in him to make it the last. But even that effort of self-examination felt like too much, made him feel sick, and he shoved the question tiredly from his mind. Head down. One foot in front of the other. Hide in plain sight, by virtue of non-action, and slip in silence through another day. Doyle shrugged into an industrially-laundered grey overshirt taken from the pile on the shelf and tried to connect his current outer shell with his interior, with the man who once had lived there. But all he came back with were echoes.

Echoes. Pained short grunts bouncing off a prison wall. David Wilkes was twenty one, the loser by just a few weeks in the birth-date lottery that would have kept a luckier lad out of adult jail for another year. Ray doubted Borstal was much of a picnic either, but at least there he’d get fucked over by someone his own size.

Getting fucked would be his destiny anyway, Doyle knew. He’d seen, tried to save, lads just like him. Hapless, sweet-tempered under the bullshit, too thick to stay out of trouble – virtues compounded, in David’s case, by a startling beauty. Doyle gave him six months…

The grunts turned into sobs.

 

“You big ill-mannered slob,” Doyle observed mildly, reaching into the shower stall and grabbing a beefy shoulder. “You could at least’ve jerked him off.”

The boy’s assailant tore out of him and spun on Doyle with a roar. Wearily Doyle blocked him, boredom a greater adversary than this monster’s crewcut halfwit strength, half hoping the clumsy fists _would_ do some damage, buy him a few days in the infirmary where at least it was quiet. But he was still fresh from his old life, and he knew the skills would die hard. The big con – Reid, Doyle recalled, ironically in here for assault on a minor – was wet and unpleasantly slippery under his hands, so he let him off easy, converting his head-down bull-charge into a throw. Distantly he enjoyed the thud of flesh on wet concrete as Reid slammed off the far wall; spun round on hard-trained reflex to make sure of him…

Blood on the tiles. It was not so high a contrast as that of crimson on white skin, and Reid was bleeding from his nose, not his dearest deepest core, but something lurched inside of Doyle and tried to come to life.  _I am a killer. I may as well kill._

 

It took four guards to haul him off Reid. The huge, fleshy man stared after him with a child’s terror. In the doorway, Doyle ripped out of the warders’ grasp far enough to turn and yell, “If you lay one more hand on him – or any other kid in here – ”

He caught the scared shake of the shaven head before being marched out. Halfway down the corridor he added, inwardly, for his own satisfaction – _in fact, come to me for permission before you have a wank_ – and was smiling as the warders chucked him back into his cell.

 

Solitary would have been a relief to him, and he thought the governor knew that. If a point was being made about the equality of all Her Majesty’s guests, Doyle lacked the energy to care, and he hoped the old man wouldn’t throw his weight about too hard either, on his next visit. Solid laundry detail was unpleasant, but his ice had reformed swiftly after that brief humanising thaw at Reid’s expense, and nothing was reaching him. His hands cracked and his sinuses burned with the chemicals, and at night in his cell he would consider these symptoms as if they belonged to somebody else.

David Wilkes was intensely grateful. Doyle caught him lurking in corridors and corners of the laundry room, unsubtly trying to intercept him. Knowing what form his appreciation would take – the poor lad had no other currency – Doyle kept his distance, wearily amused. But his body could trick him into compromise still, and when a vat of bleach split open and disgorged its contents over his hands, he found himself doubled over in Wilkes’ supporting grasp and bloody glad of it. “ _Fuck!_ ” He sobbed in silence. “Ah, _fuck_ , that hurts…”

“I bet. Come on. Come over here.”

Head spinning, sick with pain, Doyle leaned against the nearest sink and submitted to having his hands immobilised beneath the cold tap. Wilkes was still propping him, pressed close. Slowly through the searing in his burned palms and fingers, Doyle became aware of his warmth, of the fine hard planes of his young body beneath the prison coveralls. He relaxed minutely.

“Let’s go somewhere. I’ll tell the screw I’m taking you to the infirmary. It’s only Robson; he’ll let me. I’ll give you a quickie.”

Doyle choked on reluctant laughter. “That your idea of first aid, then?”

“More an emergency service. Come on, Ray. Tell me you don’t want it.”

 

Doyle couldn’t. He gave it a try, as Wilkes manoeuvred him into a cleaner’s cupboard outside the infirmary, but his cock made a liar of him the second his captor dropped to his knees and undid his uniform trousers. Gasping and grabbing at a trolley handle for balance, he tried not to push too hard into the young man’s open, willing mouth. “Christ, I can’t.” That was a blatant untruth, as well, although a new one: until his scalding five minutes ago, his flesh had lain in a dormancy of shock since his internment. David made the proper sound of incredulity, and went to work.

Ten minutes later he sat back on his heels and looked up at Doyle in bemusement. “You’re lovely,” he said, rubbing his jaw, “and I’d kneel here and do you all day, but if you don’t get off soon we’re gonna get caught.”

Lost, Doyle blinked and stared down into his face. A stranger’s face – that was the problem. A stranger’s mouth. For the first time since John Farrell’s visit – a week ago; he’d kept the image from his mind for a week – he allowed himself to think about Bodie. Not Bodie running into battle without covering fire, because Doyle had somehow taught him to think he was immortal. Not coming round in a hospital bed, wondering why in hell his partner had not moved heaven and earth – had not organised a fucking jailbreak, because Doyle knew he would have, any time up to the fifth of May – to get to his side. Just Bodie folding to his knees, the morning after their first encounter, a cold grey dawn with rain lashing down the bedroom window. Making them both late for work, but not very, because to Doyle the first touch of that mouth had been so sweet he’d lasted barely thirty seconds, falling back against the doorframe where Bodie had ambushed him, crying out in the anguish of release.

David choked and hung on. He’d been pinned in place and face-fucked so often he could probably swallow a snake if he had to, and Doyle was making no attempt to immobilise him. But he was suddenly wildly urgent, and coming hard in grim silence, spreading his hands for balance on the wall.

 

“I can be him again, you know. Whoever you imagined to get yourself off.”

Doyle stopped, hands shaking, in the midst of sorting out his clothes. He took David by the shoulders and knocked him, very gently, against the cupboard door. “No,” he said. “You can’t. Not ever. Your only bloody hope – and it’s a slender one – is to be yourself, and keep your nose clean, and get out of here, and never, ever come back. You’re a nice lad, David. But come near me again and I’ll fucking kill you.”

 

**

 

To Cowley’s annoyance – then slowly dawning horror – he found that he could do much less for Doyle than he had thought. The death of Prince Karim was the hottest political potato that had come his way in some time, and although he issued threats and called in favours, he could not cool it down. Karim’s whole family were military politicians, all with high diplomatic credentials – and immunity to match – and grudgingly respected in the Western world. Karim, whilst a renegade, was still his father’s only son. The Talashad regime was in high favour at present, keeping a safe net round certain US oil interests – which was, Cowley knew, what almost all the bitter little dramas acted out on British soil boiled down to in the end. Helplessly he watched his allies, ministers, friends and housetrained enemies step aside, capitulating one by one to the shah’s demands. An extradition order. And Talashad had the death penalty.

A fortnight after his visit to Fleetgate, he had run out of delaying tactics, including the obvious one of losing the paperwork. He spread out this final piece of incompetence over a number of days, making one last desperate calculation. Four weeks; it had been four weeks. Bodie was a tough, tough bastard, and he healed with ferocious swiftness, as if throwing his mortality back in the face of God. Cowley left it one more day. Then he let it be known to his men, and to Murphy especially, who visited Bodie regularly, that one of their own was about to go down.

He telephoned the Home Secretary to apologise for his obstructiveness. “Mr Whitelaw, I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s been perfectly obvious to you and your department that I’ve been dragging my feet.”

“Well, to be frank, George, yes.  Understandable, however. I know how far you’ll go to protect your men. Having said that…”

“Yes. Justice must be seen to be done. I do accept that.” Cowley wedged the phone under his ear, gazed out over his rainswept city, and tried to find a sufficiently wheedling tone to convince this bureaucrat that he had an old Scots warrior at his feet. “Listen, William…” Yes, that was good; he was making his own skin crawl. “Listen, my department is vulnerable at the moment. Any further fallout from this mess could do us untold damage. I’d like to think I can rely on Whitehall to shield us as far as it can.”

“Well – personally I’d be delighted to help, but you know I can’t make any promises.”

“No, of course. And I haven’t done much to deserve your support, given how I’ve handled this matter.” He paused, just long enough for a tortured conscience to get the better of rugged individualism. “I’d… like to be of better service henceforward, if I may. To be frank with you, I’ve seen the inside of Fleetgate jail, and it won’t hold a man like Doyle indefinitely. He’s trained to escape and to hide. The Talashad regime has issued a fatwa, and if he does abscond, he’ll be a risk to the public as well as himself. I’d recommend a move – to the Woodmere detainment centre in Hereford, if you can arrange it. The security there is state of the art.” He sighed. “I know it’s probably too little too late, but…  Well. At the end of the day we both serve the Queen, don’t we, Home Secretary?”

 

**

 

A hospital lavatory was a weird place to fall in love. Bodie reflected on this at some length, hands propped on each side of the sink. He had been making unassisted trips for a fortnight now, but he still needed time to work up the strength to get back. Watching his own pain-gaunt face in the mirror, he asked himself with some bitterness why in the hell it had taken him this long. Why it had taken disaster.

Because God knew he had always loved Ray. How could he not?  There was only so much loyalty, intelligence, charm and good humour a sane man could withstand before he began to love, and then Doyle was so physically enticing that finally getting his hands on him had almost been too much for Bodie; he’d wanted to parade him joyously round all London’s streets and parks, and he knew he had left it to Ray to put the brakes on and stop them getting sacked or lynched. But for all that, he hadn’t felt what Doyle did. Up until this enforced sabbatical, long hours with nothing to do but hurt, itch and think, he hadn’t allowed himself to consider what Doyle felt at all.

Doyle had killed for him. Not logically, not tactically, not to save his life. He knew Ray would do that; had shot so many would-be murderers away from his throat and unsuspecting back that Bodie knew he’d never be quits with him, especially now. No, the horse had gone, as far as Ray knew – and still he had killed, in a flash of grief and rage. Doyle, who for all his relaxed moral outlook, was rigidly, irritatingly insistent on the value of human life. Whose conscience could crush him even when the killing had been justified.

The significance of this had slowly crystallised in Bodie’s mind as the drugs wore off. And for some reason he had reached the end of his thought process here in the stuffy, unfragrant ICU bog.

 

He made his way painfully back onto the side-room ward, just in time to see Murphy jog past the nurses’ station. He was concerned to see that Murph’s normally sanguine mask was pale, and that he had not stopped for his ritual (and, Bodie hoped, ironic) attempt to chat up Giant Haystacks. “All right, Murph?  What’s up?”

“Oh. You’re on your feet. That’s good, because – ”

“Tell me in a minute. Listen, mate. I’ve got to see Doyle. I know it’s a tall order, but I really, really need to.”

Murphy came to a halt, pushing the door closed behind him. “Oh, you do, do you?  That’s handy, too. Now, sit down, shut up and listen.”

 

**

 

Journeys in windowless spaces made Doyle travelsick. Alone and restrained in the back of the van, for the first time in his life he was glad of the weakness. It gave him a distraction, something to control. Like chemical burns and an aching back, it spared him the necessity of any further refinement of feeling. He closed his eyes, let cold grey light fill the space behind them, and achieved some poor relation of sleep.

A jolt, hard enough to dump him on the floor if he hadn’t been strapped in. The restraints snapped bruisingly tight, and he waited in dazed resignation for the van to resume its movement.

It did not. Doyle sat up slowly. A hijack?  Even numbed out with apathy, he had little desire to see what a bunch of Khuzestani private soldiers would make of his case. Or perhaps the prison driver had misjudged the lights. Blown a tyre. Run over a dog…

A violent thump on the van’s rear doors. “Get down!  Get down as far as you can from the door!”

Despite himself, Doyle smiled. That wasn’t a Middle Eastern accent. In fact, bizarrely, it had sounded like Anson. As if reading his distraction, the voice barked out again, “Now, Doyle, if you don’t want your damn head blown off!”

The percussion shook Doyle raw. The trouble was that _as far as you can from the door_ was only the far end of a six-inch handcuff chain, and he’d barely got his head down in time. But whoever had weighed out the plastic explosives had done so with exquisite care – just enough to blow out the prison van’s lock, with minimum damage to its contents. Nevertheless his ears were full of static, and he watched the arrival of five balaclava-blank men through the demolished rear door like an underwater ballet, slow and surreal.

The first dancer sliced open his restraint straps with a bowie knife, then grabbed at the handcuff chain to examine it.

 _\- Where’s the key?_

 _\- Guards are playing hero. We can’t kill them, I suppose._

 _\- Not and keep our armour shiny. I can shoot this off him._

“Wait.”

The last voice. It was one syllable, but Doyle’s hearing cleared to painful acuity. He jerked his head up and tried to twist around to see, but big sudden hands closed protectively over his ears, over his eyes. A rough embrace bore him tight against warm cotton, against the heat of living flesh. Joy and instinct surged in him: he heaved one great gasp of its scent, and did not even notice the gunshot two foot from his face. “Bodie. _Bodie_!”

Bodie kept him close. He knew it would be for seconds only, until Doyle emerged from shellshock and realised what was happening. But feel of that face, pressing into his side, momentarily seeking and accepting refuge, was too sweet to lose. “Yeah, sunshine. It’s me.” He tore off the balaclava to prove it, just as Doyle got his head up to look. “You’re all right now.”

Doyle swallowed hard. He stared up at Bodie, breath coming raggedly, remnants of a huge smile dying. _Reports of your near-death were greatly exaggerated, then._ It should have been a pure relief – that Bodie was so much less badly hurt than he had thought; that he was somehow on his feet and fit enough to be… Oh, God, Bodie was here to spring him. He lurched to his feet.

“Bodie!  You stupid bastard, what the hell are you playing at?  I can just about credit you’d risk your own job – your own life – but theirs too?  Our whole bloody team, or…” Through a wave of vertigo, Doyle tried to count, tried to guess at identities beneath the balaclavas. “Or most of ’em, from the looks of it…”

Jax pulled off the headgear and grinned reprovingly. “He didn’t hold a gun to our heads, Doyle.” Murphy, the next to unmask, added, “Wasn’t even his idea, strictly speaking.” Anson settled for a wave. Then McCabe, whose gun harness had caught on something and who was struggling to unfasten it, glanced up and finished off with perfect seriousness, “Lucas has sprained his ankle. He said to tell you he was really sorry.”

Doyle fought laughter. Trust Lucas to send his apologies as if he’d had to miss a garden party… Then he rounded on his partner, white with fury. “Bodie, get them out of here. All of them. You, too. Go!”

“Not a chance. Look, you can agonise over it later, but – ”

“Bodie. I did something terrible. I’m ready to face what’s coming to me.”

“Fine. And if that meant ten years in some British jail with five off for good behaviour, I might even let you. But they’re shipping you off to Iran – for public execution, most likely – ”

“Well, maybe I fucking deserve that too!” Something snapped in Doyle, painful and dry as bone, somehow nonsensically linked to the memory of Bodie in another man’s grip. He felt tears spill, and could not spare energy to lift a hand. He stood planted in the middle of the prison van, attention fixed burningly on Bodie. “Maybe I do.”

“Ah, Ray – for chrissakes, just come with me.”

“Or what?  Force?  Are _you_ gonna hurt me?  Is that the only way anything ever gets done?”

Privately Bodie thought that it was, when it came to the crunch. The trouble with Doyle’s kind of pacifist, though, was getting close enough to apply the principle. He made a play of glancing down at his feet, running a hand across his hair in frustration. “Hurt you?  You think I sat in a hedge with this lot all morning so I could jump in here and…” That was enough. Ray’s attention was caught. Bodie allowed himself to frown, as if at distant engine noise, then swung round to stare back up the road. “Oh, _shit_.”

He was good. All the others looked, too. He dropped Doyle with a single punch: caught him tenderly.

 

Murph and Mac between them carried Doyle out to the more inconspicuous of the two cars they’d brought with them. Neither was from the HQ pool. Bodie watched, breathing carefully, now genuinely surveying the distance for signs of pursuit. He had found that he could get through the worst of the pain if he just shut up and concentrated on controlled respiration – or at least he could most times, and this had better be one of them…

He collapsed against the dented Ford’s bonnet. Jax grabbed him and assisted his instant, reflexive scramble upright. “Bodie, you can’t do this. Not alone.”

“I have to. This is my problem. You just… get the lads back to town. Look after them.”

“All right.” Jax frowned, brow creasing. He glanced to check if any of the others were in earshot, but Mac was revving up the other car, and Anson and Murph were persuading the prison driver and guard that they had wanted to park the van in thick cover then be thoroughly tied up in the back. “Look,” he said. “It’s none of my business. But Doyle was – bloody heartbroken, in Kensington the other week. Seeing you do that. If the two of you get out of this alive, I…” Seeing Bodie’s bewildered look, he stopped. “All right. None of my business. Just take care of him. He’ll probably forgive you. God knows he’s soft enough.”

 

**

 

A distant reach of Sevenhills airport, a runway and hangar used only for small commercial runs back and forth to central Europe. A perfect June evening, red sun poised on the horizon directly across from a fat rising moon, their light combining across the vast flat space between them. Doyle dumped the rucksack Bodie had given him onto the tarmac, and sank down beside it, feeling the night wind rise out of the Sussex fields around him, cooling his sweat-damped skin. Bodie had set a hard pace to this rendezvous, after parking the car amongst decaying agricultural vehicles outside a derelict farm.

They had had a brief, intense discussion, upon Doyle’s return to consciousness in the Ford’s back seat, finding himself being jounced at high speed down the A23. Given Bodie’s pallor, and the lengths to which he was apparently willing to go to secure his cooperation, Doyle had decided to give in, briefly anyway. In battle mode, Bodie was impervious to reason – and he was armed, although Doyle knew he wouldn't go that far. So he’d accepted, gladly enough, the change of clothes Bodie had handed him from out of the boot, and stood still while he’d taken a pair of wirecutters to the remains of the handcuffs on his wrists. Then they’d run together through the darkening lanes, entering the airfield across a gap in the perimeter fence. Security was minimal. The airport was mainly used by recreational pilots, and they hadn’t been challenged as they made their way to the outer runway, where a battered-looking cargo plane was warming her engines on the apron.

Bodie was in discussion with the pilot, a shady-looking character very much in keeping with Doyle’s experience of his wrong-side acquaintance. Doyle didn’t much care what kind of deal his partner had struck: he was out of here, now that Bodie had kindly relieved him of the prison uniform and accessories, just the second he could make a decent run.

He touched the place where Bodie had hit him, cautiously testing the bone. But the blow hadn’t marked, and left little residual soreness. Doyle was silently impressed by this. It took skill, to knock a man cold without damage. Then, Bodie had good hands… Remembering them on him in other contexts, Doyle shivered, and wondered if the months of his life leading up to the siege had been a dream. After all, how likely was it that a man like Bodie could have become his lover?  A smiling, warm-skinned presence in his bed, lighting up grim winter dawns with sleep-clumsy kisses… Jesus, no. The manifestation in front of Doyle now was much more convincing. An ex-merc and soldier on the run, driving a hard bargain in the half-light. His face was cold, closed-off. The pilot nodded – convinced, or more likely intimidated, into agreement – and made for the gangway.

 

“All right, sunbeam. We’re on. He’s making a run to Kalamata. Immigration's slack around the tradesman's entrance. Let’s get going.”

Doyle looked up at him. He had transformed again and was smiling, holding out a hand to pull him up. Perhaps, after all, Doyle should make his move now. If he let Bodie get him off British soil… “How’d you persuade him?” he asked, playing for time.

“Oh, he owes me a favour.” After this airy pronouncement, Bodie’s face crinkled into the wry mask Doyle had once loved. “Sadly, not a very big one. I had to dip into our holiday funds.”

Doyle loved it still. It hit him suddenly that escaping this situation meant escaping from Bodie. And even under duress, even as an abductee, the last couple of hours had been the best Doyle had known for a month. No matter what the circumstances, running at Bodie’s side felt right to him, the thing he was born and built to do. Suddenly hungry for his touch, he reached to take his outstretched hand. He didn’t need helping up, but he used it for balance, gave Bodie a little of his weight…

Bodie dropped to his knees on the close-cropped turf. The hand not in Doyle’s clenched so hard that his fingers drove into the soil, and he tore the other one free before that could close in spasm, too: he’d have broken the bones he held. The pain was incredible. It soared straight through his techniques for controlling it, or even to keep quiet – before he could clamp his mouth shut, a groan tore from him, and he doubled up and forced the next one to silence.

“Bodie!  Jesus, what is it?”

“Nothing,” Bodie managed between gritted teeth. “Just pulled me stitches a bit – don’t fuss, Ray!”

Doyle, who had done nothing more than lean over him, almost smiled. Then he realised the stains on Bodie's shirt were too dark for sweat. “God almighty. Let me see. Hold _still_ , Bodie, you moron – let me see!”

 

Doyle knelt with him in the last of the burnished light. After a brief disagreement over the untucking of his shirt, Bodie had subsided against him, eyes closed tight, and let him have a look.

“How the hell have you been on your feet?”

“It isn’t as bad as it looks.”

“Bodie, it is. You should be in hospital.”

“I have been. I’ve been flat on my back like a good lad for a month. Even Cowley reckoned I was fit enough to do this, and he’s right. Ray, I can’t give this up now. They’ll kill you, and I’m finished, too, for trying to stop them. For God’s sake let’s go.”

First stars were just pricking the copper-blue dusk. Scents of cut grass and jet fuel came and went on the warm breeze, and behind them a deeper fragrance, one that made it even into the city, sometimes, at this time of year. The waking earth. England’s broad uplands, exhaling their first breath of summer. Doyle asked himself if he was ready to turn away from it, to trade it for concrete walls, for a brief, final look at an alien sun. He tried to find an honest answer within himself and could not.

Then Bodie stirred in his arms, and the answer came. The world might be well lost – but for now, at least, Doyle could not turn from him. Every time he closed his eyes, Doyle saw a sobbing boy plead uselessly for his life – but he opened them on Bodie’s torn flesh and barely healed, still bleeding scars. On Bodie, who had given up everything to get them both his far. He thought anyway that, by the time they got to Greece, Bodie might be too weak to stop him from taking him straight to a hospital. “Cowley, eh?” he said. “When he promised to try and help me, I didn’t think…”

“Well, believe me, he tried the diplomatic channels before falling back on a road ambush. And before you go and drop your fiery sword on his desk, he didn’t… organise it. Just told the lads the date of your transfer, and we took it from there.”

Doyle sighed. “All right. I’m not making any promises, Bodie. But for now – all right. Christ, can you even stand up?”

Bodie pushed stolidly to his feet and stood swaying. “I’m fine.”


	3. Chapter 3

Sunlight hammering silently on slatted louvre doors. For a long time Doyle lay motionless, trying to orientate himself against the direction of the blaze, to accept the reality of the heat that accompanied it. His sleeping mind had already processed the chirring of crickets to background noise and he no longer noticed it, but thought he could hear something deeper – a giant arid crackling of earth…

 _Not Edgware, then._ Surfacing, Doyle hauled a breath and pushed up on his arms. He was stiff and sore from sleeping belly-flat on a very thin mattress – a plain wooden bed-frame – but the new aches and pains overlaid a weariness whose source he remembered all at once. “God. Bodie. Bodie…?” Not there in the bed beside him, which was – almost – a double. When Doyle disentangled, throat too parched for further speech, he realised the blurring of his vision was in fact a mosquito net, not so much hung as dumped over him. He scrambled out of it and stood in the rippling heat, head pounding, yesterday’s clothes sticking to his skin. The ferocious pressure of sunlight against the frail doors almost scared him – and out of an old habit of immediate confrontation of his fears, he went to pull them open.

Light hit him like a thrown rock. He lost a breath and forgot to draw the next: three feet from where he stood, the world dropped away in a dizzying tumble of rock, sheer to a shining sea far below. For a moment he was lost in it. His mind suspended activity. He was nothing but response, to a shocking beauty that briefly blinded him, wiped memory’s slate clean…  Then he saw the road, a thin silver snake in sunbleached rock, by which he had somehow attained this place. At the end of it, parked awkwardly and perilously near a cliff-edge, the tired-looking hire car where he had left her, prosaic cue in a dreamscape, triggering memory.

The airport, so many hours of bumpy flight away from home Doyle had not been sure what day it was when they touched down in the dust, the blinding sun. Cash for the guards at the airport, cash for the hire car. Bodie had kept handing it out, and in the right currency, from what source Doyle had no idea and then ceased to care –  because out on the road, when Doyle had decided enough was enough and tried to turn the car around, Bodie had pulled a gun on him.

On one level Doyle had known he would not use it. But the gesture – that Bodie was willing to make it – had knocked out the rest of the fight from him. He had realised then, finally, that although he knew part of Bodie, that part of Bodie knew and loved him, the rest belonged elsewhere. Belonged to the jungle. To the army, to John Farrell. Under Bodie’s terse instructions he had pushed the Fiat to its max and torn off down the curving coastal road, blind to its beauties – sapphire Aegean to his left, to his right the lifting crests of the Peloponnese, every few yards a flash of melon pink and green from the roadside stalls – and soon was making even the local drivers understand the foolishness of trying to overtake. When the curves had tightened to hairpins, Bodie had lowered the gun, hoarsely apologised, and reached to stroke his hair. “Slow down, Ray. Slow down.” And Doyle had pushed his hand away, but obeyed, and driven like a machine, silent, unseeing, until Bodie had told him to stop.

He’d half-carried Bodie through a darker patch in darkness his partner had assured him was a door, though he’d been numb enough to turn the other way if so instructed and step just as easily off the cliff. Tiles under his bare feet. He remembered he’d kicked off his trainers to try and find the Fiat’s tiny biting point on the hairpin ascents. A slight lessening of the murmur he had not registered then was the voice of the sea, and Bodie telling him there was the bed, that he could stop now. And somehow instead of propping Bodie he was being gently pushed forwards and down, and he had assumed Bodie would simply fold onto the mattress beside him...

He turned, blinking away sun-dazzle, and saw that the bed’s other half was undisturbed. Thirst, and a need to find Bodie – both hit him at once, blending in his exhausted imagination to a single purpose. Leaving the garden louvres open behind him, he made his way through the bare little bedroom’s hot shadows to the only other door.

A living room, or a kitchen of sorts: the stark space did not immediately declare its purpose. All it contained was a table, and a chair beside it, and his partner, apparently sound asleep with his head on his arms. Impossibly beautiful, even now – laid out and abandoned, hair in sweat-damped spikes, shirt sticking explicitly to powerful shoulders and spine. “God,” Doyle said hoarsely, stumbling over to him. “What are you doing here?” Bodie didn’t respond, and Ray allowed himself a panicky feel for the pulse at his throat. It was there – a too-rapid kick in the artery. His skin was hot, hotter even than could be accounted for by the late-morning inferno outside, turning this unsheltered house to an oven. “Where the hell have you brought us?” Doyle demanded grimly, crouching beside him to unfasten his shirt and examine the scars and the stitching beneath. They were bad enough: closed his throat with empathic horror as they had on the airstrip back at Sevenhills, but he couldn’t see any infection. Hoped to God Bodie had just worn himself into a fever. They were hours from anything Doyle had recognised as civilisation, and he was willing to bet there was no phone. “Sunbeam, wake up.”

Bodie groaned and tried to lift his brow from the back of one wrist. “Fuck. Why?”

Repressing a smile in spite of himself, Doyle inwardly allowed that a fair question. “So we can get you to bed. Why’d you sleep here?”

“Didn’t think you’d want company,” Bodie told him thickly, and Doyle noted with concern the hollows beneath his eyes, the difficulty he was having focusing. “I’m sorry I pulled the gun. I’m sorry. I’m…”

“I know you are. Don’t worry now.”

“Did you get bitten?”

“No.” Doyle leaned down and hauled him onto his feet, pulling one arm round his shoulders to steady him. “What are you on about, you great delirious lump?”

“Mozzies. I found a net, put it on you. Are you all right?”

“Well, it was like waking up inside Miss Havisham’s wedding frock, but… I think so. Ta. What about you?”

“Eaten alive. They like me. They’re bad out here this time of year.”

“Bodie – everything’s bad. What were you thinking, dragging us to this godforsaken…” He shut up and concentrated on manoeuvring Bodie towards the bed, and then onto it, without jarring his injuries. “There you go. No, don’t fight.” Settling him, he noticed bright red circles raising the skin of his wrists and ankles, marring the shapely set of the joints. The heat coming off the swellings was fierce. Maybe that as much as anything was making him run a temperature.  “I’ll get you something for those. Next time join me in the bloody net. Hang on.”

“Ray, there’s no…” Bodie pushed painfully up onto one elbow. He shook his head as if trying to clear it. “There’s nothing here. ’M sorry.”

“No first-aid kit? Great. Okay. I’ll fetch you some ice and – ”

“Nn-nn. No fridge. No electricity.” He appeared to give it thought, then added with a small exhausted flinch, “No water.”

A short silence, broken only by the desiccating crackle of sunlight on tinder-dry grass. “Oh, Bodie. You are fucking joking. Is this shack even plumbed?”

But Bodie was out. He lay where gravity had dumped him, flat on his back, one arm draped across his eyes. Doyle swallowed dull pain at the sight of him – magnificent Bodie, brought so low. But what distressed him more was his own lack of any deeper response. The surface worry, the aesthetic dismay of watching a beautiful animal laid out and suffering, was all he felt. That and grinding thirst. “Jesus,” he breathed, and went to shut the louvre doors, put a frail shield between that fine white skin and the sun on whose altar Bodie had for some reason chosen to sacrifice them both.

 

 _No water._ Doyle reached in through the open door of the hire car, clicked the ignition round and stared at the petrol gauge long enough to work out how many miles short he would fall, even of the half-remembered village whose existence was a ghost on the back of his mind’s eye from his drive up here. Waves of heat-distort and molten vinyl spread from the car’s interior, and he swayed a little, feeling sick.

Then anger came to his rescue, burning off the beginnings of panic. Bodie had stranded them here. So be it. Doyle could have refused, but he hadn’t. And now something had to be done.

The boot contained their rucksacks, which Doyle had forgotten about. He was disproportionately heartened to see the few changes of clothes they contained – evidently packed by Bodie in a tearing rush, but so much better than nothing. There were also some basic tools for changing a tyre, most usefully a small, rusted jack and a wheel spanner that could be pressed into use as a crowbar.

Back in the house, he knelt and reached under the sink. His head was pounding too much for him to worry when the dark space turned out to contain a scorpion as well as some previous tenant’s emergency kit – matches, candles, a screwdriver. Numbly he watched the irritated creature scrabble away across the kitchen floor and vanish into the incandescent day beyond the threshold. Then he hauled himself upright and tried the tap. Nothing, but a distant metallic groaning indicated that perhaps at some point there had been. He went in search of the bathroom, and found a five-by-five concrete shell out the back just barely dignified with a toilet and shower, or rather the trappings for both, since the water that gave them their function was absent here, too, apart from a stagnant half inch in the toilet bowl. “Fucking lovely, Bodie,” he breathed – but reflected grimly that even the basic facilities felt like a bonus. He supposed it depended on the perspective forced on you by your surroundings.

His surroundings appeared to be a desert. Light blasted off the dusty whitewash of the outside wall, off the bleached dead soil. Tracing with his fingertips the rust trails in the concrete that marked the bathroom’s pipes, he located the external line.

Twenty yards uphill from the house, feet blistering on grass that cut like glass, he dropped to his knees beside a drain cover almost concealed in sand. Removing it with the tyre tool and the screwdriver took him a length of time he could only calculate by the increase of pain in his head and the amount of skin he was taking off his hands: he was slipping on his own blood before the metal lid groaned and lifted.

The supply line wasn’t broken – had been switched off deliberately, probably when whoever owned this godforsaken place had realised it would never attract even the most desperate of tourists. Doyle had a look at it, becoming interested now in spite of himself, and saw that he could switch it back on. That involved shifting a valve cover rusted almost solid with its pipe. He managed by wrapping his t-shirt around it and hauling on it with both hands, and measured another tract of time in the burning of the skin of his naked back. The valve gave. He extracted several handfuls of mud and an elaborately dead cat. From somewhere in the hot earth uphill came a cool sound of water.

 

Back in the bathroom, he flipped a rust-specked chrome switch, stared up at the dry shower head and briefly considered knocking his head off the wall or crying. Then he recalled that he could ill afford the dehydration, gave a snort of bitter laughter and started working on the faucet.

An agonised howl from deep within the system. Doyle ignored it, too tired and frustrated to hope. The shower head coughed and spat – suddenly drenched him. He leapt back. The water was warm and smelled foul. But that lasted only a few seconds. By the time he had slipped, landed hard on the concrete floor and righted himself, cold sweet water was blasting through the little room, cooling the very air it touched. He stood in his jeans and let it pound him. Let his mind go blank.

 

By comparison the electricals were simple. A blown fuse in the tiny primitive mains box, a spare left considerately to hand. And there was a fridge after all, half concealed beneath dusty cardboard boxes and the nesting system of the biggest bloody spider Doyle had ever encountered in his life. He filled what looked like an ice tray with what looked and tasted like drinkable water. Well, he’d drunk some himself half an hour ago, using the only testing equipment at his disposal, and if he was wrong, at least the damn toilet now flushed.

He went back into the bedroom. He hadn’t been able to locate any cloths or towels, but the T-shirt he’d torn off earlier would do, dipped in a bucket and wrung out. Kneeling by the bed, he pressed the cold fabric first to Bodie’s brow, then to his throat and pulse points, everywhere the heat was radiating off him most intensely. Too exhausted to think about the intimacy of the act, he had undone his shirt and was gingerly working on the angry scar tissue under his ribs when a unique throaty chuckle stopped him in his tracks. He sat back on his heels. “Bodie…”

“What are you up to, then, handsome?”

“Trying to lower your fever, you clown.” Doyle smiled, shook his head. “Anything more personal right now would amount to necrophilia.”

Bodie swallowed dryly. He couldn’t argue. His head ached fiercely and he was parched: a second later his attempt to sit up and see Ray backfired on him savagely and he found himself retching over the side of the bed. “All right,” Doyle said calmly, pushing the bucket into range and competently propping him. “All right, son, don’t worry. Touch of heatstroke. You’ll be okay.”

“Oh, God. It's so fucking hot.”

“You noticed that?  What were you thinking, you idiot?  This place is a desert.”

“I thought it was better. Bought it years ago, to have somewhere… somewhere to run to, but I never came here…”

“You and your foxholes.” He mopped Bodie’s mouth for him. “We’ve got to get some water into you.”

“Told you, there isn’t any – ”

“Is now. Take it easy.”

Slowly Bodie realised that the cooling heaviness on his skin – delicious, when a faint air current made its way through the room – was wet cotton. A fuzzy greyblack interval passed, and then Ray was back, holding a tin mug to his lips. “Sorry,” he said, hoisted Bodie unceremoniously into a sitting position, and more or less poured it down his throat. Bodie choked, gagged – but then it was too good, unbelievably fucking good, and he immobilised Doyle’s hands with his own round the cup and drained it.

“God. How did you… Can I have a bit more?”

“In a minute. See if that stays down.”

Bodie leaned into him and shut his eyes. The proximity of another hot human body ought to have been unbearable, but Doyle’s skin was damp and somehow cool. As if his bones were shaded in some deep green twilight, Bodie thought, succumbing helplessly to delirium. A minute later the water came again, a quenching rush that bore him over the brink of half-fainting sleep. Vaguely he was aware that Ray sank down with him onto the mattress and didn’t move away.

 

*

 

Had Ray been out fixing his bike?  That was the only time Bodie saw his hands get into this state – unsqueamish about dirt, he nevertheless liked to clean up afterwards. Sometimes the sump of whatever ancient motor he was reanimating might stain his skin, though, and the arm he had flung over Bodie while they slept was filthy.

No. Or – yes, streaked with what looked like dark mud, but bruised, too, and that was dried blood on his hands, not oil. With a grunt of pain Bodie levered himself over onto his back and gently examined the blistered fingers and palm, feeling as he did so his own discomforts float back up from the sleep depths. A pulsating headache – deep nagging soreness in bullet wounds…

“Bodie?”

Blinking, Bodie turned to face him. “How’d you do this to your hands?”

Doyle smiled. “Get your arse out of bed and I’ll show you.”

“Not sure I can.”

“Be worth your while, I promise.”

 

It was. Bodie stood in disbelief, delicious earth-cooled water pounding the fever out of his bones, his eyes shut, breath coming in shallow gasps. Ray, who had pushed him in fully clad, was now deftly stripping him: pulling himself together a bit, Bodie shook his head and began to help in the process. Once that was accomplished, and Ray had stopped swearing over the mess Karim’s M60 had made of his thigh, he turned his attention to Doyle’s jeans – he was naked otherwise – and Doyle gave a low, oddly-resigned chuckle and submitted.

Doyle didn't mean to let anything start. His every thought of Bodie and sex these days was overlain by blood-scarlet and flashing images of John bloody Farrell. But half-choked by spray and the water bouncing off his partner’s handsome shoulders, Doyle thought how close he had come to losing him, and helplessly kissed the side of his neck, a hot open-mouthed caress that made Bodie shudder and get hard. Painful laughter surged in him again: trust Bodie to recover cock first. And God knew Doyle wanted him, or wanted at least the comfort of well-known flesh, in this nightmarish alien landscape… Sliding his hands down Bodie’s water-slick spine and backside, he sank to his knees.

“Ray, hang on. No.”

 _No?_   Trying to work out the odds on Bodie turning down a blow job, Doyle shoved soaked curls out of his eyes and stared up at him. “You all right?”

“Not that all right, no. Dunno what you did to the plumbing, but it’ll take more than that to fix me, sunbeam. I’m just not up for it.”

Doyle looked him over. “More than half up, from where I’m sitting…” But Bodie had reached down and hoisted him up by the armpits. “No,” he repeated, with a gentle urgency Doyle was not used to. “I mean it. You’ve been nursemaiding my sorry arse since Sevenhills. Time I did something for you.”

Too surprised to fight, Doyle let him. Briefly – in flashes between the blast of cold water into his face and the contrasting heat of Bodie’s mouth on his cock – he saw all the reasons why he shouldn’t. Bodie was sick. And both of their lives had been turned upside down; they were neither of them what Doyle had assumed them to be. So much less, and so much worse…  But it had been over a month, his short incandescent fuck with that little jailbait whose name now escaped him his only sexual contact since, and diminished or not, shadowed or not, Bodie was Bodie still, with a mouth on him like magic, so sweet and well-versed in every bloody nuance of what Doyle liked, needed, abruptly had to have…

His hair felt like soaked moss in the rain. Pressing both shuddering hands to it, Doyle came, shoving deep into his throat, vision darkening under the blood-surge. “Oh God, Bodie. God…”

 

“I didn’t mean that to happen.”

They were back out in the kitchen, where Doyle had gone to check on the progress of his ice. Both were more than halfway drip-dried already, from the heat still blasting in through their shelter’s fragile walls. Steadying himself on the back of the chair in which he’d spent the night, Bodie frowned at him, distracted by the rosy stripes on his shoulder blades and the back of his neck. “You’re sunburned, Ray. Mean what?”

“For us to…” Doyle tailed off. He sighed and straightened up from in front of the fridge. “Here, I’ve got something to put on those bites now. Sit down.” Obediently Bodie did so, and Ray came to sit on the edge of the table beside him. He pressed an ice cube to the worst of the swellings on one wrist, and Bodie swallowed audibly with the relief of it. Keeping it there, Doyle held him still, ignoring the cold burn in his own fingertips. “Look,” he said awkwardly. “What we were really good at – before all this started, we were really good at… being mates, weren’t we?”

Bodie gave it thought. An easy enough question, but his stomach was plummeting. “Yeah,” he said, with caution, then because Doyle deserved a better answer, continued more firmly, “The best. Not half bad at the other stuff, either, mind. Why?”

“Because… Ah, Bodie, too much has happened. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, with me or anybody else, for that matter, and I just want us to go back to doing what we did best, all right?  Can we?”

He still had Bodie’s wrist in a light, careful grip. The ice was virtually gone, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. Bodie realised, with a heart-clenching pang, that his eyes were full of tears. He said, “Jesus, angelfish. Whatever you want. But – ”

“No. Leave it, eh? Just for now.” He turned away and went to rest his hands on the double doors, as if trying to shore up their frailty against the roaring incandescence beyond. Bodie watched his naked back, the silvery trickle of water from his still-damp hair making patterns down his spine, and fought not to think about what Ray had just asked of him. Fought not to shiver. His throat was still tender from Ray’s climactic involuntary thrust. He could still taste his come. He heard his next words as if through static: “Anyway, we’ve got more pressing concerns. Whatever you thought this place was, there’s nothing. We don’t have enough petrol to get back to the last town we drove through. I’m going to put you back to bed and then I’m gonna go see if I can hitch a lift from the main road. All right?”

“No. You can’t – not in this heat. Wait until tonight when it cools down a – ”

“Why’d you do it, Bodie?”

Bodie swallowed painfully. He said, in hopeless evasion, sounding unconvincing even to himself, “Do what?”

“Why did you strand us here?”

Too heartsick and tired even to deny it, Bodie found the explanation leaving him easily enough. “To get you far away enough for long enough. Stop you running back to jail even if you wanted to. Just until I could… make you believe you didn’t deserve it.” He shrugged; found a faint smile. “I did know the place was a mess, though I did think there was water. I knew you’d feel compelled to fix it. I thought it might distract you for a while.”

Doyle fought the involuntary smile Bodie could raise in him even whilst irritating him most badly. “You could make that much of a bet on me?”

Bodie shrugged defensively. “Worked, didn’t it?  So far, anyway.”

“Oh, you did well.”

He came and helped Bodie back to his feet. Bodie went uneasily into his grasp: he sounded both bitter and tired. Ray had _liked_ to be known by him – enjoyed, sometimes, not having to explain. Being comfortingly seen through. Weary nausea swept Bodie, his temperature surging again. He couldn’t find the energy to think, not even about his lover’s sudden request to be a friend. Until now Bodie had never seriously considered the distinction, not with Ray...

 

 ******

 

It was after ten by the time Doyle got back, and a luminescent twilight fallen over the hill. Almost too tired to put one foot in front of another, he made his way up the gritty track and dumped the rucksack and a canister of petrol outside the back door. Straightening up, easing the knots from his spine, he noticed for the first time that the shrubby little tree to his left – only an obstacle during his earlier, desperate tracks back and forth – had delicate five-lobed leaves, like cannabis but more delicate, a green that looked grey in the dusk.

Distractedly he touched one. They invited touch, textured like suede. The air around him was suddenly full of a scent like lavender, or sage, or neither, wild and delicious, making his head spin. He set himself against it. The hostility of this place had been all that was keeping him functional. _You got me dead-on, Bodie. Adversity trips all my switches. Can never resist a really good hard time._

The air had cooled and laid its blanket of moisture softly over the burned-out grass. There was another tree, now he came to look – an odd thing with a rounded crown and tiny closely packed leaves like holly. Each of these caught and gave back the blue dusk, now fretted with spectral little moths, and, while Doyle watched, a huge droning beetle whose carapace flashed emerald green before it vanished off into the shadows. “Not helping,” Doyle told it unsteadily, and pushed his way into the house.

Bodie was profoundly asleep, and his fever was down. Leaning over the bed, Doyle ran a fingertip touch across his brow, and helplessly saw again the moment in a battle-torn building when Bodie had let go and slipped away from him. He sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly breathless, once more on the brink of that utter emptiness, that abyss. He would have been entirely alone in the world. What he could not for the life of him understand was why he now felt that he _was_. Throat sore with unshed tears, he tore his attention away from the powerful, damaged body’s lovely curves, and looked a little desperately around the room for his next move.

All the floors were on a tilt. It was mild, but you couldn’t have placed a marble on the tiles without it rolling gently west towards the sea. Doyle had assumed that this was part and parcel of the dereliction – a subsidence, perhaps, that would one day take the place off the cliff, and not a moment too soon. Now he looked more closely, and saw in the seaward corners of both rooms small holes that looked like runoff channels. Opening the doors – setting himself against the night air’s delicate new warmth – he followed the channels outside, and realised they would carry water in a hole-drilled half pipe to a bare patch of earth that might once have been a flowerbed. A basic irrigation system. There were no rugs, and nothing to spoil. The furniture was cheap stained pine or plastic. He remembered seeing a coiled-up hosepipe in the back of the scorpion’s cupboard, and went to get it out.

Hosing the floors down had two effects – the first one obvious, swilling away all the sand, dust and ants, leaving the tiles clean and smooth underfoot. The second was to wash out some of the heat from the place. Almost hypnotised by this, Doyle worked slowly, once across the kitchen and bedroom and back, so that when Bodie woke, it was to cool shadows and the sound of running water.

 

“How’d you manage all this, then?”

Doyle looked at the kitchen table. _All this_ was not too impressive – just a big loaf, some sliced chicken, cheese, olives and fruit still in their tubs and paper bags. He’d hoped to do better, but the two-plate hob wasn’t working, nor indeed any of the lights. The fridge must have overloaded the fragile system. Still, he supposed that, considering their start, it wasn’t too bad. He’d remembered to get candles, and had propped them in sand in two of the teacups from the cracked and dirty set of crockery he’d found in one of the cupboards. Maybe the candlelight made it look better. “Well, it’s not the Ritz, but sit down and try to eat something.”

Bodie obeyed cautiously. He’d slept so deeply he felt unreal, and for the first time in many years, didn’t know how to start an ordinary conversation with Ray Doyle. “You, er... got back into the village all right, then?”

Doyle gave him a look, and a tiny half-smile, that acknowledged the difficulty. He decided to help out. Bodie looked fractionally better, but still worn down. Pouring wine from a plastic water bottle – he’d thought the dark little store didn’t stock any, nor olive oil, which had puzzled him until the owner had explained in gestures that they made both themselves and simply decanted them out of tanks in the back – he related his trip: setting off on foot and flagging down the first car that appeared, a massive post-war Merc held together by dents and dust. The driver had seemed to take him philosophically, and keeping a cursory fingertip on the wheel while he tackled the mountain road with Le Mans verve, gave him in sign language some basics of Greek – _yes, no, bread, wine,_ and, when confronting oncoming traffic, what Doyle assumed to be _wanker._ He had dropped him off in the village, waving away with smiling affront the drachma notes Doyle had tried to hold out to him. A bus had taken him part of the way back and after that a truck-driver. By that time Doyle would have been willing to offer a blow job to pay for the ride if necessary, and thought that in Britain it might have come to that. Out here, though, the rules appeared to be different. A traveller on a lonely road would naturally get swept up, if the routes coincided. There seemed a friendly, offhand economy to it.

Bodie listened, eyes bright with amusement. He wondered if there was a place on this earth where you _couldn’t_ drop Ray, and have him tackle it to the ground within twenty four hours, probably making a couple of friends en route. They had food, and somewhere to keep it fresh. They had water. In other circumstances Bodie thought he and Ray would almost be enjoying themselves by now.

The local wine was powerful. Bodie’s flesh, having brought him this far, was calling in its debts, and seemed to want paying in sleep. Despite having spent most of the day flat out, he felt a dark tide of weariness start to shift in his bones. He stiffened against it. But Doyle saw, as he always did, and got up frowning from his side of the table. “Come on, Bodie. Quit while you’re ahead.”

 _Oh, am I ahead?_ Bodie hadn’t thought so. He’d lost Doyle as a lover – how, he was far from sure – and did not even dare examine what that would make him feel, when he had the strength to do more than sleep and keep breathing. And Doyle had been scrupulously good to him, but Bodie couldn’t help but feel he was being _dealt with_ , like the shower and fridge and the car’s empty tank. “Ray,” he said, uncertain of what he was going to ask.

Doyle’s eyes met his, with the tiniest warning flicker. Bodie could read that, but not what it meant. Cold anger, held in check by manners and good nature, but not the reason. He sighed. He supposed he’d given him reason enough. Ray lived by his own stern code, and perhaps he’d had no right to intervene, even in dire circumstances, to make him violate it. “Doyle,” he said wearily. “I’m not gonna keep you here. I thought this was right, but… do what you have to.” He shrugged, indicating his weariness, the strong chance that he’d be sleeping on the kitchen chair again tonight unless Doyle chose to help him to his feet. “Not in any condition to stop you, am I?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Doyle said, easily, leaning down for him. “That Browning of yours is a damn good argument. Better keep it some place where the sand won’t clog the works.”

They stood together in silence. Doyle was holding him up, efficiently and without affection, still smiling faintly. For the first time – bizarrely, since the kitchen’s louvre doors had been open to the garden as soon as the night breeze had started to come off the sea – Bodie began to notice the sounds of his environment. Crickets, a mass-choral synchronised symphony of them that could drive you crazy, if you didn’t let it drop to the depths of your mind, with the murmur of ocean and the wind. The spitting of the candle flame, the intermittent self-immolation of exotic beautiful moths. He listened and watched, and took the calm mask Doyle was presenting to him now and put it side by side in his memory with his look in the car on the way from the airport, with that unguarded flash of betrayal and pain. Ray had looked…

 _Heartbroken_ , Jax had said, back on the prosaic English verge. Bodie’s memory flickered round its gaps and retreated in fear. “I’m sorry,” Bodie whispered. “I told you I was sorry.”

“Yeah, you did. Don’t mean to be a hardarse about it. Come on, let’s get you to bed before you drop.”

“Want some help to clear up?”

“Two plates and a bag?  Think I’ll manage.” He started to steer Bodie towards the bedroom.

“You’ll come through, too, won’t you?”

“Yeah, in a bit. Why not?”

“Well – I don’t know. You might not have wanted to, if…”

“What – we can’t share a bed if we’re not fucking?” More than a flicker this time: a hot flare. Bodie was almost relieved by its passion. “What else does it change?  You’d better tell me now, in case I violate any other non-fucking rules, walk in on you in the bathroom or – ”

“Doyle!” Bodie could not help the crack of amusement in his voice. That was a serious error with Doyle at this point, and he was almost glad when a spasm of pain took his strength, knocked his legs out from under him once more and deposited him in a tangle with Doyle on the tiles.

“God,” Doyle complained, after a minute. “I wish you were well enough that I could stay pissed off with you.”

“I will be soon,” Bodie told him, breathing hard. “Just gimme a couple of days.”

The louvre door rattled, jolting them both to raw-nerved, hard-trained defensive postures, surprising to stillness the tiny and exquisite beast that had just pattered over the slats. It was pale salmon pink, and had wide-splayed toes, each one ending in a rosy suction pad.

“What the hell is that?” Doyle asked, looking up into its fathomless black eyes.

“Turkish ghecko, I think,” Bodie replied, and they both burst into laughter.

 

Part of the problem, Doyle knew, was that they had been so damn good together, he and Bodie. As friends or as lovers. They were like a felled tree, still putting out leaves in the springtime. _Or a brontosaurus_ , he added to himself, wryly stripping the image of romance. He’d heard somewhere it had taken them a while to realise they were dead, too. He helped Bodie carefully to bed, then brought a candle in and had a look at the mosquito net. There was a hook in the ceiling over the bed, and he suddenly remembered the discarded plastic loop he’d seen baking in the sun amidst the garden’s other debris. He found it by the candle’s wind-shivered light, threaded it through the fabric straps at the top of the net.

Bodie watched him, balanced on a rickety chair, stretching up and over the bed to hang it. He looked like a tiger by candlelight, his Ray – lean muscle and elegant limbs, the shifting light almost giving him stripes. Pain and exhaustion had their uses, Bodie reflected bitterly, fighting a surge of desire. He hoped it was not just Ray’s new prohibition. _You had this look, mate_ , said a voice in his head. _Like a kid who wants everything. Never for any good reason – it was all just out of reach._

Where the fuck had that come from?  It made Bodie shudder and feel sick. He rolled onto his side, curling up as far as pain would allow.

“Bodie?  You all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I…  Thanks for fixing that. Come and get in before you’re bitten to death.”


	4. Chapter 4

Doyle found a map in the Fiat’s glove box, and saw that the next town west along the coast road was larger, though further away than the village back towards Kalamata. He set off early, hoping to escape the worst of the heat, leaving Bodie a curled anonymous heap under the sheets.

In ordinary circumstances, Doyle would have left him a note. He didn’t dare look too closely at the omission. Until he was parked outside a phone box a couple of miles outside the town, he didn’t dare look at his intentions.

He rubbed his left arm, painfully sunburned after two trips in a continental drive. Looking at the dusty phone booth – it seemed out of place here, the roadside shrine beside it a kind of reproach, with its faded plaster saint and fresh flowers – Doyle remembered how he had felt yesterday, waking alone on the sun’s anvil. He had brought with him his passport, and the bare amount of money he needed.

To make a good supply run, or to get to Kalamata and pay someone there to take the car back for Bodie.

Stiffly he got out and stood on the ochre-red verge. The soil was crumbling dry, but somehow supported long grasses, shifting in the wind, and waist-high swaying flowerheads that looked like the cow-parsley weeds that grew back home, only more delicate, and – now Doyle came to look – decorated each in the middle with a single black floret. Beyond the metal crash barrier, rosy brown rocks dropped sharply to the beach, and beyond that, a crescent-shaped bay held waters of a blue so intense Doyle had to shield his eyes.

Three days ago, he’d been staring through bars at a grey sky in Fleetgate. Karim of Talashad, unless rescued by his faith, now saw nothing at all.

Doyle knew he could get morbid. He knew he’d given his boss and his partner a hard time, when he could not reconcile his conscience to his duty; that his inner fights could last for days and render him barely fit for human company. And he’d known, on all those occasions, that no matter how he felt about his actions, they’d been right.

Not this time. He pushed off the side of the car where he’d been leaning, and made for the phone box.

An old woman was blocking his path. Doyle had seen dozens like her, even in his brief experience of rural Greek life: small, clean, brown as amber. Dressed in black, from headscarf to lace-up boots. He’d wondered distractedly if they were all widows, or if, after a certain time of life, they lost so many relatives that staying in mourning was simpler. Glancing up and down the road, Doyle tried to see where she’d come from. He must have missed a hamlet, or one of the roadside melon stalls. But there was nothing for miles. Well, she could only want to use the phone, and, manners aside, Doyle was in no hurry to make his own call. He nodded, gestured  toward the box – being careful to avoid the palm-out gesture Nikos the cabbie had kept thrusting toward oncoming traffic – and resumed his slouch against the car.

She smiled back, and extended a courteous hand toward the shrine. Nonplussed, but willing enough to be diverted, Doyle straightened up again and followed her. Maybe she needed help.

But apparently she thought that he did. The little saint in the painted wooden shelter was worn to genderless anonymity, surrounded by bright yellow flowers like marigolds and, more surprisingly, garlic bulbs. Candles burned in sooty glass pots among the flowers, lighting the faces on the many fading photographs tin-tacked to the wood. All this was far from alien to Doyle, though he had left the flowers and mystery of his Catholic roots a long, long way behind him. He found himself touched, and stood at a respectful distance while the old lady rooted about amongst the offerings. After a moment she emerged with what looked like a carved blue stone, roughly set in silver, hanging from a worn leather cord.

At first Doyle thought the little image was a fish. Then it caught the light and became a human shape, or half of one: below the powerful torso was a fishtail that split into two. A merman, one creature above, two below. Divided and whole. Doyle had seen something like it before, dangling from a Greek driver’s rearview mirror in a London taxi. But that had been glass or plastic, and this one was finely worked in something like agate or lapis lazuli: dark cobalt in shade, flecked with gold. He reached out to take it on instinct as she held it out to him, and she let go the cord, nodding.

Doyle tried to refuse it, then tried to pay. She wasn’t offended, but Doyle knew what _ochi_ meant by now, with accompanying raised eyebrows and deprecating hands. He thought about it, turning the little creature over on his palm. It was cool, and old, and quite beautiful. He couldn’t just take it. Maybe she’d accept payment in kind – a lift, perhaps, because she had to be a long way from home. He pointed to the car, tried to convey to her that he was going into the town, but couldn’t remember the name of it. “Hang on,” he said, grinning at the failure of sign language. “I’ll get the map.”

When he straightened up from the car, the road was empty. He was alone, for mile on windswept mile. It should have been a shock, but it wasn’t. He rested his backside on the sunwarmed bonnet, and held the little amulet up to the sun. Too good by far to swing off a hired Fiat’s mirror. But when he thought about putting the soft leather cord round his neck, or returning the amulet to the shrine, neither idea felt right. After a moment he pushed it carefully into the pocket of his jeans.

 

Methoni had something approaching a supermarket, which made Doyle almost sorry – the day would be a sad one, when these weird glass cubes on the hillsides replaced the dingy, aromatic village stores. Nevertheless it was useful, and Doyle started with first-aid basics, including sun lotion, retsina and a good-sized bottle of the fiery local white spirit called raki, then went on to do as thorough a grocery run as his drachmas would allow.

There was a petrol station, too, where he signed to the owner to fill her up, bought another canister to go with the empty one from yesterday and got them both filled, too. Smiling at the irony of driving far enough to buy enough petrol to drive safely back, he kicked off his trainers once more and headed for – God, he’d almost called it home…

 

**

 

Bodie wasn’t there when he got back, and Doyle looked for a note and supposed he deserved the lurch of his heart on not finding one. But Bodie’s motivations were less complex than his own, and twenty seconds later he found him crouched against the wall on the little concrete terrace to the west, shivering in the last ten inches of shade. “Mate? Are you all right?”

Bodie started. He looked up at Doyle with vast distances dissolving in his eyes. “Oh,” he said. “You came back.”

It was almost toneless, but Doyle read it clearly. “Course,” he said, and went to sit beside him. He wasn’t hypocrite enough to ask Bodie why he’d been worried, and joined him in silent perusal of the garden. Same heat-shimmered hell as yesterday, but Doyle noticed for the first time that they had two olive trees – and, incongruous against their silvery ancient beauty, a yellow plastic clothesline stretched between them. “Look,” he said, sketching its shape in the air with one finger. “I got some soap powder. We can do laundry.”

Bodie shot him a sidelong glance. “That’ll be fun.”

“And if the fuses I bought are okay, I can do you a cup of tea in half an hour or so. How’s that?” Bodie’s faint smile indicated approval, but his attention had drifted again, as if he’d been concentrating fiercely on something outside himself to stave off fear. “Sorry, mate,” Doyle said quietly, sliding an arm round his shoulders. “Should have told you where I was going.”

“No. I was fine.”

Bodie’s muscles were set, and Doyle accepted the resistance, easing away. “All right. You’re hot again, though. Can I have another quick look at the damage?” Bodie nodded, pulled up his T-shirt and sat passively through the inspection. “No worse. I won’t ask to see the rest. You’ve been eaten alive again, though, mate – didn’t you stay in the net?”

“Yeah. Couple of the little buggers must have been hiding in the mesh. Don’t understand how you get away with it.”

Doyle made a face. “Tough hide, that's all. I bought some stuff for your bites.” He paused. “What were you looking at out here, anyway?”

“This, I think. I’m not sure it was here yesterday.”

Doyle, who had thought the same about the olive trees, followed the direction of his gaze. The strip of sandy, heat-cracked soil now was shaded by a verdant little shrub, covered in bright green leaves and dazzling flowers. As he watched, a butterfly sailed in, five inches at least across a zebra-striped wingspan, and settled serenely on the tip of one branch.

“Swallowtail,” Bodie unexpectedly remarked, then reached to pull a leaf from the bush. He broke it between his fingers, and handed Doyle the fragrant halves to smell. “Myrtle.”

“And just when you think you knew somebody... I thought the lizard must have been a lucky guess. How the hell do you know?”

“Ghecko,” Bodie corrected gently. “Spent a few months in a similar environment in Turkey in the ’60s, killing a… quite extraordinary number of Kurdish partisans. One of our hostages was a natural scientist. Spoke English. It was something to think about.”

Doyle sat watching him, inhaling the rich, invigorating scent of the leaf in his palm. The butterfly took off, and it seemed to him that its flight brought the first throb of thunder over the hot garden – meshing, pulsing thunder, borne on frail grey-gold wings…  “Jesus, he said. “We’re both fucking delirious, I reckon. Come in.”

 

The skies darkened. Doyle, working on the fuse box behind the kitchen door, didn’t notice, and nor did Bodie, who had refused to go and lie down until he’d done one useful thing around the house, in this case holding the torch for him. The fuses were right, and they smiled at one another as Doyle threw the reset switch and all the lights came on.

Lightning exploded directly over the house, a millisecond before an apocalyptic roar of thunder, and knocked them straight back out.

“Shit,” Doyle said, looking at the screwdriver he’d been poking into live circuitry not twenty seconds before. Then he broke into laughter.

 

The storm was brief but ferocious, throwing the louvre doors open on a cold, ozone-spiked wind. There was little point resisting it. The house was as ill-equipped to withstand bad weather as good, and once he’d propped the doors back on chairs so they wouldn’t smash off their hinges, Doyle found himself drawn to the grey-green chaos outside. He’d never seen anything like it in England – huge bolts of ultraviolet fire dropping almost casually out of the belly of the clouds, the thunder not separate peals but a constant bone-shaking roar. There were no high trees nor church spires to draw the lightning. It made do with rocks, olive groves – again, invisibly, but sending a hair-raising chill through him, the house. “How are we not getting blown to hell?” he asked Bodie, who had come up behind him to snake a restraining arm around his waist.

“There’s a conductor up there, a good one. Even the worst shacks around here have good lightning rods.”

“That’s reassuring.” Doyle had been too busy looking at the problems on ground level to notice. The feel of Bodie’s arm there was reassuring, too; so natural that he pressed back against his warmth, unthinkingly settled his backside into its accustomed place against his groin. Bodie flinched and let him go. “Oh, God!  I’m sorry.” He jolted forward, for one insane moment too distracted not to walk out into the storm.

“No!” Bodie caught his arm. His face was hard to read, but Doyle thought that the cold wind must be doing him some good: he had a little colour, and his grip was firm. “Wait. Just until it starts raining. You’ll be safe to go out then.”

 

When the downpour began they both went out, entranced. The storm had stopped as if switched off, and the rain came down in a vertical cascade, undisturbed by the faintest breath of wind. It was warm and rich, soaked them both to the skin in ten seconds where they stood in the cliff’s-edge garden. The myrtles and the olives sang with it, and the…  “What’s that tree, then?” Doyle managed, as best he could with rainwater pouring from his fringe into his mouth.

“An oak,” his unlikely expert told him. “Looks like a holly, but… A kermes oak.”

The oak had a bench beneath it. Not the concrete block that would have been in keeping with the rest of the house, but a low stretch of timeworn stone, gleaming deep grey in the rain. Together they went to sit down, and the downpour eased, and the western sky tore slowly open to admit gilded light.

When next Doyle looked away from it, vision stained red and green with dazzle, he saw that Bodie had fallen asleep against the trunk of the oak. He’d drawn one knee up, bare foot hitched on the edge of the bench, and lightly clasped his hands around it. And Doyle lost breath at the sight of him: wet clothes clinging to his powerful frame, face serene in the tawny shade. His mouth dried out and his head spun slightly with need for him, and he stonily turned his thoughts into prosaic tracks. Maybe he should wake him, get him indoors. But there was little chance of him becoming chilled. Now the skies had cleared the air was gathering heat once more, although freshly this time, loaded with scents of wet, warm earth.

The hungry ache at his groin did not subside. Abruptly Doyle knew he had to get away from him, and stood up. He’d left his shoes indoors, and expected his soles to be lacerated on the glassy-edged blades of dead grass that surrounded the house. But when he stepped out of the oak shade, all that he found underfoot was soft new growth.

Doyle put his hands over his eyes and swayed. There was no mystery in his world, no sacred unexplained. Olive trees and myrtles did not spring up overnight; dead land did not clothe itself in green after one storm. His life’s path ran through bloodstained streets, not veils of rainwashed light. Unsteadily he made his way back to the burning concrete house.

 

Bodie woke up easily, crossing the border without noticing the change of state. The pain in his leg and lungs had stopped, washed out in sleep and rain. He smiled at Doyle, who was kneeling by the bench, setting out on it a bottle of water, the sun lotion, and some insect repellent. “Sorry, mate. I’m not much company at the moment.”

Doyle glanced up. “You’re fine. You’re recovering. Listen, I’m going for a scout around up the hill. See if I can find an easy way down to the sea – a swim would do you good. Or I could drive you down.”

“Wait up, Ray. Nice thought, but you’ve been to the village and Methoni now. If there is anyone looking for you, and they’ve seen the car… Well, I think we should lie low for the moment.”

Doyle sincerely doubted anyone cared enough about him, alive or dead, to follow him to this wilderness. Still, he knew their exit from Britain had been too fast, clumsy, not the undetectable trail they’d have left if they’d both had time to put their minds to the job. “All right,” he said. “Wish I’d brought a book, though, if it’s a case of house arrest.” And that was a mistake: their eyes met, both of them involuntarily picturing how they would have put the time in until yesterday.

This time it was Bodie who let Doyle off the hook: he said, wryly, “Have you unpacked down to the bottom of your ruckie yet?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, I chucked in that enormous French paperback you’ve been pretending to read.”

“Oh. Well, that was considerate.”

Bodie looked down at him. He was flushed in the shade, across his cheekbones and in the hollow of his throat, the pattern that would mark him when he was getting turned on. Eyes too bright, and greener than leaves in the sun. Absolutely bloody irresistible. Bodie gave up. “Ray?”

“Yeah?” He smiled up at Bodie, brilliantly. “You all right?”

Bodie shifted forward on the bench. “Ray,” he repeated, low and urgent. Doyle blinked, but did not retreat from the hand he put out to brush his jaw. “Ray, love, c’mon. Stop running. We were made to do this.” He leaned in and pressed his mouth to Doyle’s.

 _Always like velvet. Always so much kinder, more thorough, enthralling, than anything I felt before or could imagine. I even forgot in between times._ Doyle shut his eyes and remembered. He felt tears scald his throat, and helplessly leaned into the kiss.

 

“Sorry. That stretched the non-fucking rules a bit, didn’t it?”

“Bodie,” Doyle said hoarsely. “I asked you to do one thing.”

“Ah, come on, sunshine. You loved that. I can see from here how much.”

“Yeah, you’re right. That’s the problem. You can put your hand out and… have me, no matter how wrong it is. How fucked up.”

“Ray, I don’t…  Since when were we fucked up?” But Doyle didn’t respond. His attention was fixed on some point between Bodie’s solar plexus and navel, disconcerting, intense. Bodie shivered. “What are you thinking about?”

“Having _you_ ,” Doyle said shortly. His eyes were oddly blank, pupils dilated wide. “Not the way we did in London, not that… casual, polite thing we had going on, a suck or a hand job to help each other out.”

Bodie frowned. “Jesus, Doyle.”

“Quiet. I’m thinking about fucking you. Now, unless you’ve got any convincing objections. Come on, Bodie. I know it gets you off.”

 

Bodie had objections, but he knew they were far from convincing. They included _this is the wrong way round_ and _I liked our casual thing_ , but even the prospect of voicing these arguments made him ashamed. Trying to think of intellectual methods of stopping Ray in his tracks distracted him from more obvious physical ones, and ten seconds later he found himself on his knees by the bench, staring blankly at its weathered stone. Had Doyle put him there?  Had Doyle even told him to move?  Or had he fallen there, because falling was all that was left?

Ray pressed close behind him, reached round and unfastened his belt and his zip. “Brace on your arms. I’ll try not to hurt you.”

Mouth dry, vision hazing with disbelief, Bodie did as he was told. He was aware, on a level just beyond the sphere of conscious will, of two disturbing truths: firstly that Ray was angry with him – coldly, terribly angry – and secondly, that although for months he had neatly sidestepped the issue for both of them, Bodie had wanted this. Wanted to be fucked by Doyle, even unlovingly. He felt his cock stiffen and lift, at the image of how Doyle was seeing him now, kneeling with his arse bared and ready. Lowering his gaze, he changed the vision and imagined how Ray would look, if he turned around to see – trousers and briefs shoved down just far enough, cock erect and straining. Fear made it through a fog of desire, and he reached to grab the sun lotion off the ground nearby. “Here,” he grunted. “You don’t want to hurt, that might help. A bit.”

 

He stretched out and forward over the bench, elongating his spine, trying to stretch and accommodate somehow the lengthening pressure inside him. He heard his own shattered moans with disbelief; subsided down onto his belly, spreading his thighs until bullet-ripped flesh howled and tried to tear. “No,” Doyle said immediately – his first sound since a merciless, hard-thrust penetration that had almost made Bodie sick, with pain and excitement and betrayal. “Not like that. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Are you – worried?” Bodie could hardly get the words out; his throat felt blocked. “You’re fucking hurting me too.”

“I know. But there’s a difference. Isn’t there?”

Bodie lay panting. The pain across his ribs and stomach, the great bright diagonal stripe of pain that had marked him for weeks – no, that bore no relation to the stretch and pressure in his arse. Doyle was gathering him up, getting his weight off the scarring, holding his hips to ease the strain on his leg. “Yes,” he choked out. “Difference. God, come on and fuck me, then, Ray. Do it.”

Doyle pounded into him.

 

Tiny yellow flowers were scattered over the bench, knocked down from the oak by the rain.  Bodie saw them: closed his eyes and saw the bonnet of a car. _Must have been parked under a lime tree…_ He jolted and tried to push up, but the weight on his spine was inexorable. Beginning to be perfect, too: that strength, and the hot clutch of flesh on flesh inside. _Come on, Bodie. I know it gets you off._ Beginning to drift, he hung on to the far side of the bench. How had Doyle known that?  Bodie had diverted Ray from this, he now allowed himself to realise, in a hundred ways, aware that Doyle was not sure enough of himself or their new union to push for it. Why had he done it?  He’d wanted it – sometimes thought about seeking out a stranger. “Oh, God,” he choked, as Doyle found a bone-melting rhythm and somehow thrust deeper inside him. Why? Because doing it with Ray would have burned down his last barricades – left him irremediably in love. With another man. In Thatcher’s England, in the law-enforcement trade, but that was nothing. In his own heart, and he couldn’t, because the last time that had happened, it had been such a disaster… Oh, Christ, he was going to come, too soon, too hard.

 _Come on, lovely lad. Five minutes – or three, knowing you. I put my fist in your arse to the wrist once. I used to make you come so hard you cried._

But that voice rattling round his skull wasn’t Doyle’s. It hadn’t been Doyle, over the sap-sticky bonnet of a scrapyard Ford Anglia. Convulsing, starting to climax in a terrifying, rip-tide seizure, Bodie felt the last walls in his head and his heart swept away. “Oh, God! Ray, yes!”

Doyle waited until he was done, thrusting him carefully through it. Then he let go himself – grimly, almost clinical, flesh exacting its cold independent reward – and withdrew.

Bodie couldn't get breath to voice so much as a yelp. Doyle staggered to his feet and leaned over him. He said, with hopeless bitterness, “How was that, then? Not bad for an off-duty fuck?”

Bodie twisted round: collapsed onto his backside by the bench. He felt his mouth fall open, but nothing would come out. The memory block evaporated. _Last time it had been such a disaster. Last time it had been…_

 _Oh, God. Farrell._

 

 _**_

 

There was a track of sorts, better suited to goats than human feet. Doyle didn’t care: it led away. The earth was wet enough still to stain his battered trainers with red iron ore, and he stumbled on the pale limestone outcrops, whose strangely weathered spherical hollows each sheltered resilient life of some sort. Plants with strappy deep green leaves. Jewelled petals, dusty pink, like tiny mallows. So beautiful, and any toe-hold would do for them. On either side of the track, thigh- high yellow flowers, whose drying petals fell to reveal elaborate, architectural heads. Their crushed leaves felt like sage. Bodie would know. He’d know these dust-brown flattened coils, which Doyle had taken for snail shells but now thought could be seed pods, delicate and tough, scattered profusely underfoot…  Instinctively he crouched to pick one up for him, as he would have on any other day, and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans.

His fingertips found cool stone. Straightening up, he pulled from his pocket the double-tailed merman amulet, and remembered the long hot road, and a decision taken from his hands.

 _An off-duty fuck._ Oh, Christ. What an abscess of bitter rage Doyle had carried, across four weeks and half a continent. Even lanced, it raged with pain. Clenching the amulet so hard it made its image on his palm, wrapping the leather thong tight round his wrist, he continued blindly down the track.

The wet grass was slippery, the cliff’s edge disguised by scrubby undergrowth, much closer than he’d thought. Doyle twisted out of his inelegant crash to his backside, instinctively grabbing at roots, rocks, soil. For God's sake, he wasn't about to drop off a bloody cliff now, not after everything he'd...

But he'd passed a point of no return. Gravity had hold of him. The soil came away beneath his fingers, left him with a handful of mud and then nothing. He fell.

He missed by an inch the jagged ledge that would have smashed him like matchwood. He had perhaps a second to alter his position in the air, get his head down as if for a dive. A cat's desperate drop from a rooftop, the best he could do, and still he hit the water with a crack like a gunshot, and still the sun went dark.


	5. Chapter 5

Bodie sat on the edge of the bed, which was where his strength had run out. Not just strength – conviction too, the belief that he could serve any purpose, do any bloody good, by following Ray now. He'd come through here to get his shoes.

 _Nice off-duty fuck if I can’t be arsed to chase after a girl, that’s all._ Bodie remembered. Not just the part Doyle had bitterly thrown back at him but all of it.  _Ray's worth a million of me. If I could love anyone, it'd be him._ Fury burned briefly through Bodie, a wild unfair anger at Doyle for being there, anonymous behind a mask. For not hearing the whole thing, if he was going to damn well hear any at all. For not knowing when Bodie was only chest-beating, toughing up for the benefit of a fellow soldier.

Then, if Doyle had heard everything – if he had borne in mind his partner's helpless reflex to revert to military type – how much consolation would it have been to him? What the hell had Bodie been doing in any circumstances, talking like that about the sweetest, hottest bloody sex, the most unswerving comradeship, life had ever thrown across his path – whether Doyle could hear him or not?

And what had Bodie meant, _if_ he could love him?

He got to his feet. The storm had washed most of the pain out of his scars. He had new aches – in the muscles of his thighs, up inside his body where the sun lotion hadn't been quite enough of a lube. That pain sang to him. Even frozen with rage, Doyle had laid such a beautiful fuck into him that Bodie still carried the echo of it in his flesh. They broke the mould after Ray, Bodie decided, staring out into the fresh-washed cerulean. It was as if he couldn't do anything ugly even in his darkest hours. Bodie had given him the hell of a time, hadn't he, after their affair had begun – holding back, keeping it all on the surface, like he didn't know Doyle was ready for a fearless plunge. Doyle had put up with it. Doyle was tolerant, in Bodie's case anyway. In Bodie's case Doyle had the patience of a fucking saint, now he came to think of it. He forgave, widely, over and over again.

He would have forgiven words. Even words about a nice off-duty fuck. He was tough in his own way as Bodie, and he would have got over that. Words wouldn't have taken the light out of his eyes that afternoon outside the embassy, or made the poor bastard desperately try to renegotiate terms once out here alone with Bodie. Holding on to the door frame to keep himself upright, Bodie found the core of his memory block. He could see John Farrell, clearly as if the man were out in the garden in front of him, still in his body armour and camouflage gear. What puzzled Bodie was why the hell Jax was there too. Farrell grinned and hefted his assault rifle. Farrell asked Bodie if his thing with Doyle was serious, and Bodie heard the _no_ echo through him as if he were helplessly sleep-talking. Farrell said, _that's good, because I think he saw us._ Jax, dressed for a cool summer day in England, gave Farrell a look of disgust and stepped in front of him. Farrell dissolved. Jax held Bodie by the shoulders, as if he'd just helped haul him upright. Bodie noticed that he had a balaclava clasped in one hand. Bodie remembered this part fine, or thought he did. They'd just sprung Ray from the prison van. Bodie had knocked him cold for his own good and was about to abduct him. It was fine: Doyle would get over it. Jax said, _Doyle was bloody heartbroken, in Kensington the other week. Seeing you do that._

Bodie let go the doorframe. Jax not being really there to hold him up, he almost dropped to his knees. He pressed his hands to them, lowering his head. “Fuck!” he whispered. “Oh, fuck!”

 

No point in going after him. No point at all. Why would Doyle want him? If he found him, what the hell would he say? Best leave well alone. Maybe it was best now if Bodie packed his things and walked out of here. He'd leave Ray the car. Or there were other, practical things he could do, substitutes he'd made all his adult life to take place of his emotional obligations: he could build himself a sniper's nest up on the hillside and never bother Ray again, but defend him from a distance against all comers. Bodie quite liked that idea. It would mean privation, living rough, but those weren't bugbear prospects to him. No – the frightening thing would be to walk out of here now, track Ray down – or maybe meet him coming back, because when he slammed out he seldom went far, did he, reappearing like as not shamefaced about his temper within the hour – and look him in the eyes.

The most terrifying prospect in Bodie's life was meeting his best friend's eyes. Even he could see how bloody ridiculous that was. _Oh, Ray,_ he thought, straightening up, still having to lean on the doorframe. _Couldn't I just stop a bullet for you? A grenade?_

A car engine roared in the distance. For a moment Bodie took no notice. Then he remembered where he was, and he whipped round, listening. Only one car for miles around – the Fiat he'd held Doyle at gunpoint to drive here. Okay. Doyle, at liberty, was choosing to drive it away. What else would he do? Bodie would do that, in his place. It made sense.

He swallowed hard. One thing scared him worse than meeting those green eyes. Just one, and that was not getting the chance.

He'd come in here to find his shoes. Glancing round the room, he couldn't see them, and he couldn't remember where he'd kicked them off last. They didn't matter. His injured leg wouldn't let him run: that didn't matter either. Nothing did. Barefoot, at full pelt, Bodie leapt out into the raindrop-shimmered garden and onto the track. Wet ochre clay stuck to his soles. He'd chuck himself in front of the damn car if he had to.

But the car he could see wasn't leaving. Nor was it a Fiat. A dull black saloon, remarkable only for its anonymity, bumping down the clifftop track too fast for safety.

A good car for an assassin. Bodie recoiled into the shoulder-high bushes that had sprung up during the storm and now edged the path in lush green. _Agnus castus_ , these were: Bodie had meant to tell Doyle, who seemed amused by his botanical knowledge. _Chaste tree_ , and that was funny because the fragrance of their fine lobed leaves had the effect of making Bodie at once hungry and randy. He backed up through their branches, grateful for the cover. He could get back to the house from here unseen, duck in and grab his gun from behind the bed frame. Maybe he'd get to take a bullet for Ray after all. If this was some nutcase on a _fatwa_ strike, he'd sure as hell give out a few first...

But when he took position just inside the double doors – beautiful, a clear line of sight twenty yards up the track – there was only John bloody Farrell, pale behind the wheel, struggling to brake his airport hire car before it went over the cliff.

Bodie watched dispassionately to see if he would manage. To see if fate would simplify matters so far as that for him, and slake the dry fury in him at the same time. _You set me up. You chose your corner to fuck me in, your not-quite-high-enough wall. You knew, as their commander, which one out of all those visored soldiers wasn't yours._ These certainties boiled up in Bodie with such force that he couldn't feel surprise at Farrell's arrival. No, that was just nature taking its course, delivering the bastard into Bodie's hands at last. The car stopped a few feet shy of the abyss. Bodie snapped the safety catch onto the pistol but did not put it down. He stepped out onto the track and waited.

Farrell half-fell out into the sunlight. He looked exhausted, and not much like a career soldier, in sweat-patched T-shirt and jeans. “Got to talk to you. Where's Doyle?”

“Like I'd tell you.”

“Come on, Bodie! I'm not here to hurt him. Your old man sent me – send a wolf to catch a wolf, he said...” Farrell broke off, coughing. “Jesus, it's hot. Can I have some water?”

Bodie stepped back. He allowed Farrell as far as the shade of the concrete terrace, then said, “Wait there.” He pulled a bottle of water out of the fridge and handed it to him; watched stonily while he drank. “Cowley sent you? Bollocks, Farrell. It was his idea to spring Ray.”

“Yeah, that was some stunt.” Farrell wiped his mouth. “That's what I've got to tell you, though. Part of it. The Talashad regime bit the dust.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Very far from bloodless coup, an execution of Western collaborators. The new lot are hardline isolationists. Your lad's a hero to them, for shooting Karim. The charges against him have been dropped. There's... There's no-one left alive to press them.”

Bodie took this in. The news, though obviously good, seemed to impact on him from a distance, through fog. He and Ray had found their refuge here regardless of the state of play in the Mideast. And Ray would take no more interest in being a hero than he had in being cast as the villain of the piece; a change of regime wouldn't take the boy off his conscience. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks. But you didn't blaze in here like a bat out of hell to tell me that. What's the other part?”

“You don't just call off a _fatwa_. Cowley had a telegram waiting for me at Kalamata. He's been tipped off that a bunch of rogue militants are heading this way, if they're not here already. I found you by asking a few questions and spending a handful of drachma, Bodie. They – ”

“They could do the same.” Bodie nodded. “Right. Are you finished there?”

Farrell swallowed the last of the water. “Yeah. Ta.”

“Don’t need to ask you if you’re armed, do I? Come on.”

He set off down the clifftop path. Pain was racketing around his leg and lungs even from his brief exertions so far. It didn’t matter. It gave him a focus, something to resist. He heard Farrell behind him, slipping and cursing on the unfamiliar terrain.

“Where are we going?”

“Got to find Ray.”

“Isn’t he here? Where – ”

“Farrell, shut up.” You worked from point-last-seen with missing persons. Doyle, the ex-copper, had taught Bodie that. It gave you a thread in the labyrinth. And Doyle, last seen, had been a straight-spined, angry presence on this path, putting as much distance between himself and Bodie as he could. “We had a fight, okay? He walked off. This way.”

Farrell’s silence was brief but eloquent. When he broke it, Bodie could hear all the shades of incredulity, mischief, readiness to laugh. “A fight, Bodie? Lover’s tiff?”

“You pick your times to piss me off, John, you really – ”

Bodie caught his foot on a rock. His reflexive move to save himself failed – completely, as if nerves had been severed – and he hit the track with a grunt. He bit his lip to stop himself from crying out. He'd barked the skin off his palms and cracked his knee so hard he felt sick. “Shit!”

“Will...”

Bodie twisted round. Farrell was leaning over him, brow rucked with concern. The soldier Farrell had once been would have given Bodie a cheerful kick and told him get his arse up. Then, the soldier Bodie had been would have leapt up already. Would not have fallen in the first place. “I'm all right.”

“You're not. I saw you get shot, remember?” Farrell reached down and took hold of him, ignoring Bodie's attempt to shake him off. “I don't even know how you're walking around. Come back to the house with me. I'll find Doyle.”

“The hell you will.” Bodie got halfway up and collapsed again, pulling Farrell to his knees beside him. “Fuck!” The pain sent skyrockets through him, lighting up the sequence of events that had just reformed in his memory, trying to bind them in a chain. He clutched at Farrell's T-shirt. “Did you... John, you bastard, did you know what would happen?”

“What?”

“If Ray saw us fucking. If he heard what I said. He'd never have hauled off and shot Karim in his right mind. _Did you know?_ ”

“Jesus, mate. Listen to yourself. How could I have known that?”

Bodie took deep breaths. The fireworks faded. “Okay. But you did set it up, for – ”

“For your precious Ray to see the dark side of your moon? Damn bloody right I did.” Bodie glanced up in surprise. Farrell's face had blanked in sudden rage, his fists clenched hard on Bodie's arms. “I knew as soon as you turned up with him. You forget – I know how you look when you love someone. I saw it. And I saw a chance to tear it down. I didn't mean the stupid sod to end up in jail, but I wasn't sorry when it happened.” Farrell paused for breath, then finished hoarsely, “You bastard, Bodie. You dumped me. You treated me like shit. I nearly died.”

Bodie swallowed. He'd had a letter from his former CO during his first week of Special Air training, informing him of Farrell's suicide bid – that it was being hushed up, but could Bodie shed any light. He'd had a letter from Farrell himself shortly after, which he'd burned unopened. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“What?”

“I know what I did to you. I'm sorry.” Farrell looked disconcerted. Bodie supposed the last thing he'd taught Farrell – or anyone else for that matter – to expect from him was an admission. An apology. Well, it was long past time. “I did love you, and I did ditch out on you. I wanted the SAS. I didn't want to be queer. Okay?”

Farrell sat back on his heels. He ran a hand over his hair, angry mask melting to bewilderment. “Er... Okay. But – ”

“And you're right. It was a lovers' quarrel. Me and Ray are lovers, or we were until I fucked everything up. I don't blame you for trying to take him away from me, but now...”

“All right. Yes. I'll help you get him back.”

 

They continued on the track. The next time Bodie stumbled Farrell reached to catch him, and Bodie allowed it. They didn't speak. Farrell's silence was of a particular quality. _Sandbagged_ , Bodie thought, repressing a wry grin. He could have punched the poor sod in the face and not astonished him half as much. He'd never known the heartfelt truth could be such a weapon.

It had a hell of a recoil on it. He was dazed, walking uncertainly in a world whose colours were too vivid, lights too varied, to take in. Detail hit him with psychedelic force. The snailshell seedpods of lucerne trefoils scattered about in the mud. Strappy leaves of sea squills in the limestone hollows. A few yards ahead of him, gleaming in the cliff-edge grass, a flash of lapiz lazuli and gold.

He approached it warily. The cliff top was fragmenting here, and he put out a hand to restrain Farrell. “Careful.”

“What is that?”

“I don't know.” Bodie scooped the amulet up by its leather cord. It was a Triton figure, a merman with two tails. Or two divided mermen conjoining, if you liked to look at it that way.

“Is it Doyle's?”

“No. I never saw it before.”

“Bodie – somebody went off the edge here. Recently.”

Bodie jolted upright. Farrell was on his hands and knees, dangerously close to the brink. “How do you – ”

“Look. Here's where the cliff gave. There's clumps torn out of the mud, fingermarks. Whoever it was must've dropped that necklace. Shit, Will – watch it!”

Bodie ignored him. He dropped to his belly and scrambled far enough forward to see down, down and down into the glittering abyss. The Triton wasn't Doyle's but he knew with clawing certainty that Doyle had touched it. If he lifted the cord and inhaled he would catch Doyle's scent: he knew. He caught his breath in a throat-scourging sob. “Ray!” Only the sea and the birds replied, and he called again, louder, leaning further.

“For fuck's sake.” Farrell grabbed him by the shoulder and shirt collar, hauling him back. “What are you playing at? You said it wasn't his!”

“I know. But he fell here. Christ – he fell here. I've got to – ”

“What – jump off after him?” Farrell's grip on him was iron. “I don't see anyone, okay? He must have missed those ledges, and the water looks deep enough... He might have stood a chance. I'm assuming all of Cowley's finest can swim.”

“Yeah. He can swim.”

“Right. I'll run back and get the car. Go and wait for me by the road, okay?”

“No. Not fast enough.”

“Will, if you take the quick way down, I'll never forgive you, and nor will he when we find him.” Farrell hoisted him up and pulled him by main force to a safe distance. “Do you hear me? Get your arse in gear, soldier – now!”

 

**

 

Doyle was swimming. He didn't know why or for how long. It didn't seem important. All that mattered was continuing to make the smooth, measured strokes that would bear him through the water.

Maybe he was in the training pool at the gym. An endurance swim was part of his physical, and because Cowley expected his men to be able to endure a lot, it took a long time: he often would get bored and slip into a light trance, the lengths passing by him barely noticed. Different when Bodie was in the pool, of course. Water was one area where Doyle could easily outstrip him, at a sprint and a long haul, and he took great pleasure in it, catching the outraged flash of his eyes as their paths crossed.

He laughed, and choked on salt water. Not the pool, then. Kicking down, he sensed a depthlessness beneath him – lost his rhythm and briefly flailed. _No_ , he commanded himself. _You survived that fall – you can get through this. Just keep going._

It wasn't surprising, Doyle reckoned, that the voice in his head telling him to survive now sounded more like Bodie's than his own. It was Bodie who kept that faith for him, wasn't it? Who insisted he live, even when Doyle was no longer sure he wanted to or could. Bodie in the ambulance with him, shouting, more impatient than concerned. That had made Doyle laugh too, though the bullet in his heart had crushed the expression of it down to a flickering smile. _Hoi, I'm dying here. Can't you be a little bit nice even now?_ Not that Bodie couldn't be nice, even if it only involved coming and sitting on his coffee table, face alight with teasing compassion for the state of him, while Doyle lay on the sofa in one of his self-immolations of guilt. In the gap between the worlds of life and death, his image had spoken to Doyle with conviction of a strength Doyle could feel running from him like sand from a glass. _You won't fall when they push._

 _To the pure, all things are pure._ Doyle hadn't known what he'd meant by that, and could hardly have asked him afterwards. Understanding sparked in him now, bright and uncertain as the sun on the wavecrests around him. Did Bodie think he could do no wrong because he had nothing wrong, nothing impure, inside him? God, how had Bodie preserved that bloody illusion after all those years with him on the street?

Salt water, sunlit waves. Not the pool, then. Not England. Doyle's horizons cleared and he saw ahead of him a sweep of Mediterranean blue, nothing but that until, far off in heat-mist, a tawny strip of land.  Okay. He'd dropped off a cliff, and he was taking this swim at a stately breaststroke rather than his usual athletic crawl because he'd hit the water in freefall and it felt as if his spleen were trying to climb out through his ears. His ribs and shoulderblades felt pulped. He'd twisted his fall into some sort of dive at the last second but had still impacted hard enough to knock him cold – he couldn't understand why he hadn't drowned.

Probably because Nature, always contrary, had read his indifference. Not as much fun picking off someone who was almost ready to go. And, ready or not, here he was, limbs working, heart pumping, every fibre of his body pushing him onward, closing the gap to that streak of shimmering land. Already he could distinguish green beyond the beach, the indigo shadows of mountains. _Come on, Ray_ , Bodie yelled at him, and Doyle wondered after all whether Bodie had a better grasp than he did of his ability to survive. Of his willingness to do so. Of his right.

Bodie. Flawed, imperfect. Capable of God knew what in the name of queen and country. Like Doyle was any better, and yet Bodie had loved him unquestioningly from the earliest days of their partnership, long before the attraction between them had borne its heady, bittersweet fruit. Bodie – worth killing for, worth dying for.

More than anything worth living for.

Doyle had stopped – to tread water, he thought, just to rest for a minute. But when he looked up he saw the sun filtered as if through thick glass. A bright retreating disk. He was going under. A huge convulsion seized him. He kicked upwards, muscles tearing, lungs flooding as he hauled one ill-timed breath. Exploding to surface he flung an hand out as if he could catch the sun, and then when he could breathe again struck wildly out for shore.

 

He swam until his muscles turned to blocks of burning ice. Until the sun and salt water blinded him and he no longer knew if he was heading inland or out toward Africa, until that question was suddenly answered by the brush of sand beneath his toes. He pushed one foot down and found himself in depth.

Just. The beach banked gently here, a long shallow slope, and the last five minutes of his journey were the hardest. The shallow water gave his weight back to him, a barely tolerable burden. He lurched to his feet, coughing, scraping his hair out of his eyes. He was waist deep, then knee deep, then in over his head again as the tiny middle-earth surf knocked his numb legs out from under him. He'd seen so many films where this had happened – shipwrecked mariner hauling himself onto land – he almost knew the routine. He would stagger to the water's edge and collapse face-down. He didn't like to follow the cliché but the sand looked so beautiful, a rich embracing bed, and the beach was deserted. There was no-one to see.

There was someone. Doyle, who had dropped to his knees in the silken sand, consciousness sliding from him, snapped back to the moment. A car was pulled up by the road. Doyle didn't recognise it. All the recognition in him, all power of thought, locked tight to the man running down the narrow strip of dunes towards him. Or trying to – as Doyle watched he fell, taking the next few yards of the slope on his backside. Instincts blazed to life in Doyle. He couldn't see his partner down, even if this undignified arrival was choking laughter from his waterlogged lungs. _Bodie._

Another man, racing to Bodie's side. Hauling him up and aiding his struggle onward. Through the salt-rime in his eyelashes, Doyle made out John Farrell. Redblack shadows passed through Doyle's brain, but they were shadows only, echoes, scars. He didn't know what Farrell was doing here and didn't care. If he'd stumbled out of the sea to find Farrell and Bodie enjoying a picnic, wrapped in one another's sodding embrace, he wouldn't have cared. He wanted Bodie – now, unaltered, just as he was, however the hell he ever in the future chose to be. One second more and he would get the strength to run to him. Bodie was hurt. He shouldn't be running around like this. Doyle would meet him halfway.

A whipcrack in the air. A heat flicking by Doyle's face. Well known – so alien here he couldn't place it. His disciplined flesh responded faster than his mind and he dropped to the sand, realising only once it was done that he'd dodged a bullet. “Fuck,” he rasped, twisting in the direction of the shot. Another came, low over his head: he heard the hiss as the lead split the crest of a wave. There was a second car up on the shoreline road. Its doors were open, two men leaping out of it to follow the first, who had taken position and was firing on Doyle from over a sheltering dune. Their shouts reached him on the breeze. Doyle knew little Greek, but he could tell it from Arabic, enough to know that he was screwed.

He should have known better. Another weapon roared, familiar to Doyle as a heartbeat. There was Bodie – injuries or no injuries, getting off one shot at the sniper on the dune then legging it like a gazelle to find cover of his own, John Farrell hard on his heels. A kind of ill-timed wonder rose in Doyle, a restored sense of miracle. What better time for his fate to catch up with him than now, when the bloody SAS were here to save his neck?

But they were only two, and Bodie was hurt. They were attracting fire. Doyle made a decision. Weirdly he felt fine now, fast and strong. He uncoiled from the sand and stood upright, waving. “Hoi!” he called cheerfully, and saw the gunman turn his head. Well, it meant the same in any language. _Here I am, mate. Come and get me._ Doyle fixed his eyes on a far horizon point – westward, to the mountains, anywhere away from Bodie – and began to run.

 

“Doyle!” Bodie dropped flat long enough to avoid being nailed between the eyes then heaved up to his elbows again. Doyle was on the move but still within earshot of an enraged bellow from his partner. “You do not turn yourself in to these fuckers, Doyle! You do _not!_ ”

“He's not, you moron.” Bodie jerked round to face Farrell, who was on his back, quickly reloading. He dug in his pocket and tossed Bodie another clip. “Here. You're down to your last couple. He's leading them away.”

“Well, stop him!”

“You bloody stop him!”

They both tried, or did their best at least to ensure he had nothing to lead. Distractedly Bodie remembered how it had been part of Farrell's worship of him, back in their army days, to train with the same weapons, and here he was now with a Walther to match Bodie's own, with ammo that would fit. Bodie made damn good use of it, heart thumping gratefully, anger and guilt burned away. He caught the dune sniper a neat one in the shoulder; heard him howl. The other two hesitated, distracted, but the bastard shouted at them and made an unmistakable gesture in Doyle's direction. _Get him!_

Doyle was a tricky moving target. Bodie could admire even now the grace of him, the speed. He belted out along the gleaming strand, a creature made of light, transformed from the near-drowned cat Bodie had spotted dragging itself from the water five minutes before. He was almost out of range of the two remaining gunmen, whom Farrell and Bodie between them had trapped in their nest on the dune. A few more strides would do it. He went down hard, and Bodie felt the impact in his own bones – loosed a hoarse cry of fear – but it had been a dive, thank Christ, a Doyle special, impossible to predict or follow. He was up again and running on. Farrell winged his target, just a flesh wound but enough: their leader down, the others had had their fill, and they stumbled back to their fallen comrade, ignoring his enraged yells. Between them they lifted him and began to drag him back towards the car.

Farrell grabbed Bodie's shoulder, making him jump. “I'm going after them.”

Bodie glanced at him, then out down the beach to Doyle, who had come to an uncertain halt as the gunfire had stopped. “John, no. There's three of them.”

“Only one who can hold a gun, and he'll be driving.”

“So will you, you twat. I'm coming too.”

“No. Not this time. You stay here and see to your mate.”

 _Not this time._ Bodie had stared at him. They'd run into a hundred fires together, he and John. The soldier Bodie had been would never have turned down a soldier's duty, not even for...

Not even for the man he loved. Doyle had gone down on his knees. The weird incandescence – the fires of his last-ditch hero's run – had vanished. His head was lowered: Bodie could see the worn-out heave of his ribs from here. When Bodie looked back, Farrell was gone. He heard the snarl of the gunmen's car, and then a second engine roaring into life.

He tried to care. He tried to mind that he'd let John go. He tried to think about anything other than the skinny, bone-wet figure down by the sea's edge, then couldn't even remember what he'd been trying to recall. He snapped the safety back on the gun and pushed it into his belt. With an effort that sent a blaze of pain unnoticed through his scars, he scrambled up, slid down to the base of the dune and began to run.

 

Doyle wanted to get up for him. Least he could do, since Bodie had just fought a raging gun battle to save his life. Least he could do given how they'd parted, which Doyle now remembered with a burning shame. Bodie, about ten yards away, had slowed to a walk, perhaps to give him time.

No. He was white as a cod, and Doyle knew that grim mask of his. Pain, fiercely hidden. Well, Doyle had wanted to meet him halfway, and somehow in all kinds of ways it didn't seem to be too late. He lurched up; turned the ten yards into five, and they collided, bringing one another down.

 

“I'd do it again!”

“What?” Bodie whispered. His face was buried in Doyle's salt-stiff curls. He could hardly breathe for pain, though Doyle's savage grip was fastened carefully clear of his stitches. “Do what?”

“I'd fucking kill Karim again. I'm not sorry. I'm going to hell.”

“I'll come with you.”

“Fine, then. Okay.”

Bodie caressed his ribs. He'd only seen his mate in outright sobbing tears once before, and Doyle had been drunk then, lost and shattered in the wake of Ann Holly. This felt different. Sounded half like laughter, rich and strange, a storm finding its echo in Bodie's own lungs. “Are you all right, sweetheart? What the fuck happened?”

“Fell off a cliff,” Doyle said, and that did it for both of them: they clung together, shuddering. “How did you... How did you find me?”

“Found this.” Bodie unclenched one hand from Doyle's soaked shirt and pulled the lapis merman from the pocket of his jeans. He'd shoved it in there when Farrell had come tearing down the track to pick him up. “Is it yours?”

Doyle sat back far enough to look. He grinned, dazzlingly, sun out of a rainstorm. “Yes. No. Passing saint gave it to me. I know who it would suit.” He took the amulet from Bodie's hands, gently reached the cord around his neck. “She must have known the colour of your eyes.”

Bodie examined him. That battered cheekbone looked rougher than usual. He was developing a shiner, come to think of it. “Did you land on your head?

“A bit.”

“Where else?” Doyle didn't seem able or inclined to answer, so Bodie explored for himself. Swelling on the arm now wrapped once more round his waist. He pulled up Doyle's T-shirt and drew a sharp breath at the bruising. “Christ, did a truck hit you? What did this?”

“Modified belly-flop.”

“Please don't make me laugh. Anything broken?”

“I don't think so.”

Memory surged in Bodie. He said without meaning to, “Jax told me I'd broken your heart.”

“What?” Doyle frowned, looked off over Bodie's shoulder. “Is Jax here too?”

“No, you dimwit. Over Farrell. That day in Knightsbridge – I swear, my mind wiped it out, everything from getting there with you to waking up in hospital. I only remembered when we were – just before, back at the house, when you said – ”

“Ssh.” Doyle clasped a hand around the back of Bodie's neck. He drew their brows together, then their mouths, and together they kissed the words to silence, to nothing, to wind on the bright crystal sea.

 

“You won't go to hell, you know.”

They were walking up the beach. Neither would have made it without the other, but their mutually assisted progress wasn't bad, arms tight round waist and shoulders. By the roadside Farrell was waiting, the car behind him, engine idling. He was clutching a handkerchief to his upper arm. “Told you,” Doyle said, steadying Bodie over some rocks. “I don't care. What's Farrell doing here, by the way?”

An odd sort of halo, Doyle's. Tarnished here and there, given to occasional slippage, but a halo nonetheless, and Bodie knew that it had been given into his safekeeping. “I'll let him tell you himself,” he said. “I think the poor bastard's been shot.”

“Yeah. As regards heaven and hell...”

“Yes, love?”

“We could make either right here, couldn't we? For each other.”

“Yeah. So let's be bloody careful. Ray, love, I am so fucking sorry I hurt you.”

“I know. Hadn't you better go look after him?”

 

Doyle hung back a little. He wasn't sure when he'd learned to make a hardarsed paratrooper look afraid, but it was over. The peace inside him felt like sunlight through stained glass. He watched Bodie go up to him and examine his arm. “I chased them off,” Farrell said. “Far as I could, anyway. Got their windscreen. I was going for a tyre when one of the bastards in the back woke up and...”

“It's okay,” Bodie said, and Doyle smiled and looked away while he enfolded Farrell into a hug. “Thank you. Doyle, mate...”

“Yeah?”

“Unbelievably, out of the three of us I reckon you're the one who's fit to drive.”

“I reckon so too.” Doyle went up to the car. He opened the back door for Farrell, who was shaking visibly, his armour in pieces on the ground, his pallor unrelated to the bleeding nick in his bicep. “Come on back to the house. I'll fix that up for you.” He glanced across, and spoke to Farrell with his eyes fixed on Bodie. “I tell you what. Do us a favour – when you get home, tell the old man you couldn't find us. Just for a week or so. We need a bit of time.”

 

**

 

Doyle drove Farrell to the airport, then he came back to the clifftop shack where Bodie waited, and they took their week. No further trouble followed them. Probably they were safe enough now to find a more comfortable bolthole, but neither suggested it. Instead they took the strange beauties of the place as they found them, day by day wandering deeper into the hot, aromatic maquis land, the trackless wilderness of the Mani, as far as Bodie’s returning strength would take him.

These were days of heated silence – of hands locking suddenly tight over treacherous rocks, mouth seeking mouth in the shelter of limestone caves, close-pressed stillness. Both had thought they would talk: both independently found it unnecessary. And their touching, although passionate, had been chaste, by silent mutual consent. Days to let bruises heal.

On the fifth, they found a ruined Byzantine chapel a mile and a half into the foothills, and came to a halt in its shadows, stilled by its wild, bleak serenity. The octagonal tower and part of the nave were still standing, warring for antiquity with the olives trees whose roots had invaded its foundations, or which had been here before it and reclaimed the ground: some of the spiral trunks were over a thousand years old. Bodie set down the rucksack, and pulled out from it a rug, bottled water, and a flask of the raki.  “Here,” he said. “We should stop here.”

Doyle had no argument, and settled on his back watching the zenith’s pure blue pitch. Bodie came and sat beside him, uncorked the raki and handed it down to him with a smile. “There you go. Not worried about the consecrated ground?”

Doyle propped himself on one elbow. The raki had warmed on their way up the slopes, but was rich as sunlight. “If I was,” he said, and reached to pull Bodie in, “I wouldn’t do this either.”

Coldly burning sunlight on Bodie’s lips. He pushed his fingers into the hair at Doyle’s nape, drew him up and kissed him until neither could breathe. “Well,” he commented when he could, “I should think any local god around here must be pretty used to our kind.”

Doyle snorted. “Not the Greek Orthodox one, mate, I promise you.”

But if the little church had ever held a vengeful Old Testament god, he was gone now, reunited with his vast clear sky. The church too stood restored to it, frescoes fading in the sun. Doyle reached for his lover again, with a kind of grave passion this time. Bodie moaned and thrust back at the hot erotic press of Ray’s tongue between his lips. His hand clenched on Doyle’s thigh as Doyle deftly unfastened his shirt for him and drew damp fingertips up the skin of his ribs and chest, homing in blindly on nipples that contracted painfully tight to the touch. “God,” Bodie commented around obstruction, half-laughing, half scared at the urgency he could sense in both of them, and reached to stroke his hair and draw him in again.

Doyle took a grip on his shirt and pulled it off his shoulders – then flinched as if scalded and let the fabric go. “Bodie,” he gasped. “Is it okay?  The way I went for you last time… God, do you even still want me?”

Bodie smiled unsteadily. “Answer to that’s so obvious I’m almost embarrassed.” He guided Doyle's hand down to the evidence, the lifting bulge in his jeans. He kissed the side of Doyle’s face. “What do _you_ want?”

 _What do you want? Right now, Ray?_ Dusk in an English park, a lifetime ago. Riverboats thrumming on the Thames. Doyle drew breath. “To see you. To fuck you – properly, I mean, and have you do it to me. To live with you, Bodie. For as long as we can.”

“All right. All right, love.”


	6. Epilogue

A different season, under colder stars. Doyle saw them come and go through cobweb clouds, lit orange from below by city lights, driven on a big September wind. Then he could see nothing but sparks on his own retina, as he buried his face in the pillow to hush climactic cries. He thrust down a hand to grab Bodie’s wrist, drew one knee to his chest to let him further in. The motion of Bodie's body behind him was like the rocking of a ship on a breeze-stirred ocean, deep and dark under the moon. He drew his knee up to his chest and felt him slide deeper. "Oh, my God. Harder, Bodie."

Bodie eased him onto his front, braced to the mattress and brought his weight to bear. Doyle groaned and dragged the pillow down between his thighs, dug his hands into it and hung on as Bodie began to thrust harder. Hot blood seared down into his cock. He pushed his mouth against the mattress, half-ashamed of the animal sounds Bodie was eliciting, then unable to care. Tension flooded out of his spine. He grabbed at the pillow in ecstasy. Bodie took hold of his hips and lifted him, slamming into him hard and restraining him utterly against the impact. He twisted in Bodie's hands, or tried to: he was pinned: heard his own shattered voice whisper, "Now, Bodie!  Let go now!" – and was finally, blissfully, coming, a long, delicious rush that started in his cock and did not seem to know where or how to stop.

Bodie cried out and dropped them both hard onto the mattress. He knew he was pounding into him too hard, that his weight was a suffocating force, that for long, dreadful seconds he didn't care – but Doyle only laughed and put a hand back to drag him down harder. Great flashes of otherworldly light seared Bodie’s field of vision, and he buried his face in Doyle’s hair.

 

He rolled down onto his back, drawing Ray’s boneless, moaning frame with him. When Doyle had breath, he managed, hoarsely, “Better?”

“Fuck, yeah.”

Doyle grinned. He was glad of it: Bodie had had a bad day. In some ways Doyle thought it had probably been one of his worst, although he’d taken it on the chin.

They’d come back to England in July, prompted by a sense of duty that ran too deep to be ignored. Cowley himself had met them at the airport, and Doyle, remembering the lengths to which he’d gone, had shaken his hand with wry affection. Doyle had been sent out with Murphy, and Bodie given a desk and a full physical retraining programme to bring him back to the streets where he belonged.

And that afternoon, he’d failed the medical. It had shocked him to the bone, and Doyle, who’d been hanging around with poorly feigned nonchalance, went to protest to Macklin that Bodie had jumped through every hoop set for him, and with some style. Macklin hadn’t argued: just shoved towards him the file that recorded Bodie’s vital functions after the tests.

He was still in the locker room when Doyle found him, white-faced and shivering, still breathless, now there was no point in hiding it any more. Doyle had sat down on the bench beside him, and put an arm round his shoulders.

“Ray, I’m finished.”

“In that case, love, it’s time we both were.”

 

They had decided to go back. They’d barely talked about it, except to agree that their concrete shack would do until Bodie’s compensation came through. Scorpions, ants and merciless exposure to unshaded sun were all very well, but they’d both noticed other houses in the area, some deep in their own green gardens, drenched with vines, irrigated from invisible sources, rich with scents and sounds of water.

The thought filled Doyle with deep pleasure, like the prospect of homecoming – but on another level, it didn’t really matter to him. He laid his head to Bodie’s chest, and listened, smiling. _Sirens in the city night, or the song of the sea. All home to me. All music, if its rhythm is the beating of your heart._


End file.
